McCarthy Table Talk," placing it in the tradition of such essayists as "Seneca, Montaigne, Thoreau, Twain, Whitman, Huxley, Orwell, Cendrars, Saroyan, Woolf, Eisely [sic], Vidal, Miller, Kerouac, Selzer.

[4] In a review for The New Yorker, Nick Romeo said the essay was a successful adaptation of McCarthy's distinctive writing style into the realm of non-fiction, with its "folksy locutions and no-nonsense sentence fragments and even, at points, the vaguely biblical grandiloquence of his earlier novels", and remarked that the author's "thoughts on the unconscious", though "framed as scientific reflections ... also creep toward theology.

"[4] At Quartz, Lila MacLellan said the essay provided rare insight into McCarthy's thinking during his time at SFI and praised the way it "somehow distilled the lofty ideas, unanswered questions, and epiphanies collected during this long inquiry into a beautifully written narrative.

"[4] John Gray—a British philosopher and book critic for the New Statesman—said the subject of the Kekulé problem was "hardly surprising" for McCarthy, describing the author's decades-long career in fiction as an "unrelenting struggle to say the unsayable.

"[6] The McCarthy scholar Jay Ellis said that the paper's greatest value was the insight it provided into the author's worldview, and highlighted its latent dramatic qualities: [T]he unconscious appears like a Beckett character, difficult to talk with, yet impossible to leave alone. ...