There are countless literary works that might serve as precedents, but foremost is T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land.

The Recognitions employs the same techniques of reference, allusion, multiple perspective, and contrasting voices; the same kinds of fire and water imagery drawn from religion and myth.

Both works suggest the need to return to the same kinds of moral, spiritual, and artistic values in order to rebuild our culture.

A pointed influence is Goethe's (and perhaps Marlowe's original) Faust (1805, 1833). Dostoevski other Russian writers, including Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Chekhov, are apparent. As a satire of American life it echoes the works of Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, and Twain.