The four works in this collection are related by their central character, Tribulat Bonhomet. In "The Swan-Killer," the first, Bonhomet the music lover carries out his carefully planned excursion to kill swans to hear their last songs. "The Eventualists' Banquet," the second work, reports an after-dinner speech in which Bonhomet proposes a method for ridding France of revolutionaries. And the "Motion of Dr. Tribulat Bonhomet" sets forth a plan whereby earthquakes are harnessed to rid the world of poets and artists. The last and longest piece, "Claire Lenoir," a novella, recounts Dr. Bonhomet's visit to the Lenoir home. A highly philosophical work, "Claire Lenoir" explores questions of reality, revenge, and survival beyond death, ending with a bizarre murder and a grotesque climax.

An understanding of the influence of Shakespeare on the structure and language of Moby-Dick is important because the plays of Shakespeare gave Melville a sudden insight into the significance of form and because his absorption of Shakespearean rhetoric enabled him to solve a serious artistic problem. In Moby-Dick Melville wished to write a work of symbolic fiction which would have both epic scope and tragic depth, but his difficulty lay in finding a structural and stylistic method which would provide the amplitude necessary to epic and at the same time could achieve the compression and verbal economy necessary to tragedy. He solved this problem by learning from Shakespeare to create a multi-layered dramatic structure and to use a dramatic language which becomes one layer of that structure. In Shakespeare's greatest plays there is a virtual fusion of form and meaning, and it is this fusion which, in its greatest moments, the language of Moby-Dick achieves.