Fifth Business | Literary Precedents

Fifth Business Literary Precedents

Robert Browning's The Ring and the Book (1868-1869) is one basic source for Davies's approach to the narrative material in this novel. In that poem the same events are presented from the viewpoints of different people. Davies takes that idea one step further by having his narrator write about himself. The story that we learn is incidental to what we learn about the character. Patricia Merivale has noted that in addition to being Dunstan Ramsay's autobiography, Fifth Business is also "Dunstan's 'lives' of the 'saints,'" and she relates the novel to two elegiac romances, Hugh MacLennan's The Watch That Ends the Night (1959) and Thomas Mann's Dr. Faustus (1947) as well as Thomas Mann's "ironic Saint's Life," The Holy Sinner (1951).

Michael Peterman finds several important antecedents to Fifth Business.

He notes resemblances between this novel and John Henry Newman's religious autobiography Apologia Pro Vita Sua...
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