Critics have placed this sea tale in the literary tradition of Joseph Conrad's Nigger of the Narcissus (1897), Herman Melville's Billy Budd (1924), and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1797). They have noted in particular Golding's ability to detail life at sea. This work follows, too, in the tradition of travel stories and personal memoirs, the germ of the idea for the plot of this novel having come from Wilfred Scawen Blunt's My Diaries: Being a Personal Narrative of Events, 1888-1914 (1922). In that work, Blunt recounts an incident in which a sailor lapsed into a malaise from which he never recovered.