Jacques the Fatalist

Jacques the Fatalist is a philosophical novel by the French writer Denis Diderot, known in French as Jacques le fataliste et son maitre, written between 1765 and 1780 but not published in French until 1796, after Diderot's death. The novel follows a valet named Jacques and his unnamed master as they travel together, the master repeatedly asking Jacques to recount the story of his romantic history, an account that is constantly interrupted by digressions, other characters' tales, comic incidents and the narrator's own intrusive asides addressed directly to the reader. Structured around Jacques's recurring claim that everything that happens to him was already written up above, a fatalistic philosophy critics have more precisely described as determinism, the novel drew mixed reactions from French contemporaries who found it derivative of Rabelais and Laurence Sterne, while German Romantic writers, including Goethe, who reportedly read it in a single sitting, embraced it enthusiastically, and twentieth-century scholarship came to recognize it as a major work in the self-aware comic tradition running from Cervantes and Rabelais.