Jacques the Fatalist
A servant and his master ride toward a destination neither will name while the servant tries to tell the story of his loves, and is interrupted by inns, quarrels, other people's tales and a narrator who keeps stopping to remind the reader he could send them anywhere he likes. Jacques holds that everything is written above, his master holds that it is not, and the argument runs the length of the road without settling. Diderot took the method openly from Sterne and left the manuscript unpublished; it reached French print more than a decade after his death as the sharpest anti-novel of the century.
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Lineage
- influenced by ↑ The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy
Attributes
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Symbol / motif
Conflict
Culture / tradition
Closest analogues
- 59% · 12 shared
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- 54% · 12 shared
- 54% · 12 shared
- 54% · 11 shared