Actually, there are at least two other notable similarities. For one, Red Dragon has a character named Randy who is spotted by Will (Red Dragon’s protagonist) as being a knife owner because he has shaved patches on his forearm where he tests the sharpness of his knife’s blade. IJ has, of course, a character also named Randy (Lenz), and there is a passage where Gately spots Lenz as a knife owner for exactly the same reason.

More significantly, I think the entire ending sequence of IJ owes a significant debt structurally to Red Dragon. I summarized that similarity in this comment on another blog.

A few examples I can think of offhand (with the missing text in parentheses) are:

“The Shadow of the Wind” by Carlos Ruiz Zafon (The Shadow of the Wind by Julián Carax)

“Snow” by Orhan Pamuk (a volume of poetry called Snow by Ka, the novel’s narrator)

“Cloud Atlas” by David Mitchell (each of the six novellas that make up the book has a missing text that shows up in a subsequent novella but the title is shared with a fictional piece of music called the Cloud Atlas Sextet)

“if on a winter’s night a traveler…” by Italo Calvino (one of Mitchell’s models for Cloud Atlas, it contains many false inner novels, however, the word “traveler” in the title of the fictional inner novel is spelled with two “L”s)

“The Name of the Rose” by Umberto Eco (hate to give it away, but the sought-after text is the lost second book of Aristotle’s Poetics, Aristotle’s treatise on comedy)

“The Intuitionist” by Colson Whitehead (the text is called Theoretical Elevators by James Fulton)

“Mumbo Jumbo” by Ishmael Reed (is a search for the text to Jes Grew. Intentionally paradoxical because Jes Grew represents oral culture)

Some of these books are allegorical, some are more politicized or more satirical than others, but their commonalities may include: genre-crossing, the de-emphasis of distinctions between high and low culture, the relationship between fiction and life etc. But the “quest” or the search for a “text” that they all have in common is a commentary on literature and language itself, a parody of all the assumptions about unity of structure and unity of meaning in earlier literary styles. I have a background in music, not literature, so I’m not going to cite any literary theory that I haven’t thoroughly studied, however, despite the merits of these works, it’s fairly obvious that they’re all using the same template so they’re not all that original.

“The Anxiety of Influence” was Harold Bloom’s theory that literary influence was not straightforward, but rather, Oedipal in nature. Although I can’t say I’ve read Bloom’s book, it recalls the relationship between Richard Wright and James Baldwin, who, in his first published piece, “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” attacked and completely dissociated himself from his former mentor and ended their friendship. Or Norman Podhoretz in his review of Ralph Ellison’s “Juneteenth,” claiming that Ellison was unable to finish the novel because of Faulkner’s influence over him. Those are what I take to be examples of what Bloom calls the anxiety of influence. I’ll keep my eye open for the book. Thanks.

I’ve always loved this Jim Jarmusch quote: “Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is nonexistent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery—celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: ‘It’s not where you take things from—it’s where you take them to.’”

I once read/heard DFW write/say something like: “Writers are kleptomaniacs with really good taste.”

But it’s an interesting point, isn’t it? And it hearkens back to the IS discussion from sometime in June about Wallace’s perfectly plagiaristic use of the load of bricks urban legend.

I would think that these are more than just books he thought were fun if he’s using them as teaching tools: “Silence of the Lambs” is a part of this course.