Abstract

Jacques le fataliste et son maître,1 Diderot’s “novel that is not a novel,” has no beginning and multiple endings. The narrator lacks credibility, is dismissive or even rude to the reader, and actually strives to be boring. The flow of narration is interrupted no less than fifty-one times, often just so the narrator can relish his power to direct the story. The fictional reader, a character embedded in the narrative, asks no fewer than forty-seven questions, usually requesting clarification, sometimes registering complaints. Entire sections of Jacques have been unceremoniously copied from Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. It was generally judged a critical failure: for a hundred years after Jacques’s..