Neighbors | Literary Precedents

Neighbors Literary Precedents

The fiction of Franz Kafka is the most obvious influence on Neighbors, an influence acknowledged by Berger himself.

The novel manages to capture the surrealistic or nightmarish tone of a Kafka story, which begins in an apparently realistic situation and moves to the farther reaches of the fantastic. Some other influences have already been suggested: the Tolstoy story, "The Death of Ivan Ilych," and the work of European absurdists and existentialists like Samuel Beckett, Eugene lonesco, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Albert Camus. The dark fables of Kurt Vonnegut, like Slaughterhouse-Five (1969; see separate entry), may be another precedent; but the darker side of Berger's own earlier novels—especially Crazy in Berlin (1958) and Who Is Teddy Villanova?

(1977)—is probably equally significant as a literary precedent.