Jacques le fataliste et son maître Reading Order

Jacques le fataliste et son maître (Jacques the Fatalist and His Master, written c.1765–84, published 1796) by Denis Diderot is the most formally radical novel of the French Enlightenment — a philosophical farce in which the servant Jacques tells his master the story of his love affairs while the author constantly interrupts, questions the story's progress, offers alternative versions, and addresses the reader directly. The novel is a sustained meditation on fate, free will, narrative, and the impossibility of pure storytelling: Jacques is a fatalist who believes everything is written in the great scroll in the sky, his master is a fool who disagrees without having a better philosophy, and Diderot uses their journey as a frame for a novel that refuses to be a novel in the conventional sense. Diderot was the editor of the Encyclopédie and the most radical intellectual of the French Enlightenment; Jacques le fataliste is his philosophy of determinism and materialism enacted as fiction. The influence of Sterne's Tristram Shandy (which Diderot had read and loved) is everywhere: the self-interrupting narrator, the digressive structure, the refusal of narrative closure. But where Sterne's comedy is warm and eccentric, Diderot's is darker and more ideological — the jokes are instruments of philosophical argument. Jacques le fataliste is one of the essential texts of what would later be called metafiction, and Kundera's The Art of the Novel (and his own novels, especially The Book of Laughter and Forgetting) take it as a direct model.