The first part of World's End begins with an epigraph from Washington Irving's "Rip Van Winkle," with which Boyle's novel shares much in common.

Writing in the early years of the American republic, Irving ridiculed America's lack of history by fabricating legends about the Dutch settlers in the Hudson River Valley. Like all of Boyle's novels, World's End wreaks havoc with history; and Irving provides Boyle with a precedent for rewriting the history of the Dutch colonists and their descendants in New York. World's End even includes some characters with the last name of Crane who are supposedly descendants of Ichabod Crane, the protagonist of "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," another story by Irving. Boyle also acknowledges another work by Irving, Diedrich Knickerbocker's History of New York, as a precedent for World's End.

One chapter of World's End is entitled "The Last of the Kitchawanks," which...