Literary Allusions
Corwin's encounter with "Lady" contains various allusions to the ballad "La Belle Dame sans Merci" by John Keats.
Corwin's valedictory to Dara, "Carmen, voulez-vous venir avec moi? No? Then goodbye to you too, Princess of Chaos." probably alludes to Lolita; the "Carmen" line is included by Humbert Humbert in his narration of speaking to Dolores Haze near the end of the novel. The allusions grow deep here however; the line in Lolita is itself an allusion to Bizet's Carmen as well as Mérimée's novella upon which it is based. That the reference is to Lolita rather than directly to Carmen is suggested by Corwin's mixed feelings about Dara's apparent age while she is seducing him, and the creation of a literary reference with three degrees of parentage is consistent with Zelazny's occasional predilection for subtle literary stunts.
Read more about this topic: The Courts Of Chaos
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“His style is eminently colloquial, and no wonder it is strange to meet with in a book. It is not literary or classical; it has not the music of poetry, nor the pomp of philosophy, but the rhythms and cadences of conversation endlessly repeated.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)