In the Library
Jacques the Fatalist and His Master
Denis Diderot, 1796
- Form
- Form Novel
- Reading time
- Reading time 6.5 hours
- Translated by
- Translated by Anonymous (1797)
- Chapters
- Chapters 3
- Length
- Length 92k words
£1.99
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About the book
A servant and his master ride along a French road in no particular direction, and whenever the master asks where they are going the servant answers that it is written above. Denis Diderot drafted this novel across the 1770s, circulated it among friends, and it appeared in print only in 1796, more than a decade after his death. Jacques narrates his loves; the master interrupts; the unnamed author interrupts the master; readers are addressed, scolded, invited to imagine alternative chapters and choose among endings. The book quarrels openly with Sterne, with the picaresque, with the very idea that a story can be told straight. Determinism is the joke and the wager: everything is written above, and the writing keeps changing its mind.