According to religious historian Mircea Eliade, the play "cannot be fully understood if one does not know the Tibetan Book of the Dead and the Upanishads". Les Essif in "Empty Figure on an Empty Stage" points out that "Exit the King" comes closest of all Ionesco's plays to the paradigm of absurdism established by Samuel Beckett. Though Beckett and Ionesco are commonly grouped together under the name "Theatre of the Absurd" because of their shared themes of alienation and the difficulty of communication, Beckett's plays generally present a stripped down, minimalist tableau whereas Ionesco presents a proliferation of chaos. According to Essif, "Exit the King" is Ionesco's most Beckettian play: "The image of an exterior world fades in cadence with the protagonist’s surrender to the interiority of his consciousness, that is, with the increasing intensification of his inward-turning. The vertical axis of the subjective abyss runs counter to the horizontality of the external world".