Jacques le fataliste et son maître Reading Order

Jacques le fataliste et son maître (Jacques the Fatalist and His Master, written c. 1771–1778, published 1796) by Denis Diderot is the most experimental novel in the French 18th century — a reflexive narrative in which a valet named Jacques and his unnamed master travel on a road that is never named, toward a destination that is never reached, while Jacques tells the story of his loves (interrupted by every possible narrative mishap) and the narrator constantly breaks frame to address the reader, question the conventions of novel-writing, and refuse to resolve the plot. The novel is in constant dialogue with Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1759–1767), which Diderot admired and adapted, and with the philosophical problem that gives Jacques his character: Jacques is a determinist (his captain taught him that everything is written on the Great Scroll of Destiny) but behaves as if he had free will, while his master behaves as if he were master but is actually controlled by Jacques's narrative power. The central embedded story — the story of Mme de La Pommeraye's revenge — is one of the great novellas in the French tradition, inserted in a novel that repeatedly draws attention to its own artificiality as a way of questioning the reality that narrative claims to represent. Jacques le fataliste was known only in manuscript and in the pages of the Correspondance littéraire (Grimm's manuscript journal for foreign courts) until its posthumous publication in 1796.