Jacques the Fatalist and His Master - Softcover

What happens on the journey? Jacques tells his master his adventures; this story in turn is constantly interrupted by other stories or by Diderot, as narrator, who comes in to tease the reader about the future course of the novel. Diderot is eager to be agreeable, so long as the reader realizes that the fabricator of a novel can as easily proceed in this way as in that. The book foreshadows a number of 19th and 20th century literary techniques, exchanging the rational and classical for shifting perspectives of time, personality, and viewpoint.

The world of "Jacques" is not a fixed and settled one where events are easily assessed and interpreted; on the contrary, it is a world of dizzing variety and unpredictability. For nothing is quite as it seems and an alarming proliferation of ancedotes, characters, and philosophical problems continues to spring up around the apparently central theme of the relationship between Jacques and his master, in a skilled and devastating assault on the supremacy of the stylized novel.