Jacques the Fatalist and His Master (Penguin Classics) [Paperback]

Denis Diderot (Author), Martin Hall (Editor, Introduction), Michael Henry (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 6, 1986 | Series: Penguin Classics

Denis Diderot (1713-1784) was among the greatest writers of the Enlightenment, and in "Jacques the Fatalist", he brilliantly challenged the artificialities of conventional French fiction of his age. Riding through France with his master, the servant Jacques appears to act as though he is truly free in a world of dizzying variety and unpredictability. Characters emerge and disappear as the pair travel across the country, and tales begin and are submerged by greater stories, to reveal a panoramic view of eighteenth-century society. But, while Jacques seems to choose his own path, he remains convinced of one philosophical belief: that every decision he makes, however whimsical, is wholly predetermined. Playful, picaresque and comic, Diderot's novelis a compelling exploration of Enlightment philosophy. Brilliantly original in style, it is one of the greatest precursors to post-modern literature.

Editorial Reviews

Language Notes

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: French --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

About the Author

Denis Diderot was born at Langres in eastern France in 1713. After graduating in Paris in 1732, he was nominally a law student for ten years, but was actually leading a precarious bohemian but studious existence. In the early 1740s he met three contemporaries who were of great significance to him and to the age: a'Alembert, Condillac and Rousseau, who assisted Diderot in the compilation of the Encyclopedie, which he worked on until its completion in 1773. Interested in the mind-body dichotomy, his work was a bold mixture of science and philosophy. He died in 1784. Translated by Michael Henry with an introduction and notes by Martin Hall

Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Classics (May 6, 1986)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0140444726
• ISBN-13: 978-0140444728
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5.4 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #724,417 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

33 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An interactive literary device, January 6, 2003

By 

Guillermo Maynez (Mexico, Distrito Federal Mexico) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Jacques the Fatalist and His Master (Penguin Classics) (Paperback)

Two centuries or so before "modern" writers began writing experimental novels, Denis Diderot, the force behind the Encyclopaedia effort, wrote this strange and indeed very "modern" novel in which the author leads a conversation with the reader, asking him where he (or she, of course) would want to go and what to do with the characters and the story. Here we see the author in the very process of creation, exposing his doubts, exploring his options, and playing with the story.

There is really no plot as such. Jacques, a man who seems to believe everything that happens is already written "up on high", but who nonetheless keeps making decisions for himself, is riding through France with his unnamed master, a man who is skeptic of Jacques's determinism but who remains rather passive throughout the book. Fate and the creator-author will put repeatedly to test Jacques's theory, through a series of more or less fortunate accidents and situations, as well as by way of numerous asides in the form of subplots or stories.

The novel is totally disjointed and these asides and subplots blurb all over the place, always interrupted themselves by other happenings. The most interesting of them is the story of Madame de Pommeroy and her bitter but ultimately ineffectual revenge on her ex-lover.

Diderot confesses to having taken much from Sterne's "Tristram Shandy" and Cervantes's "Don Quixote". This last novel's influence seems obvious at two levels: Cervantes also talks to the reader, especially in Part Two, and also reflects abundantly on the creative process. Moreover, the tone and environment of the book is very similar to the Quixote: two people engaged in an endless philosophical conversations while roaming around the countryside and facing several adventures which serve to illustrate one or antoher point of view.

Diderot's humour is bawdy and practical and the book is fun to read. The exact philosophical point is not clearcut, but it will leave the reader wondering about Destiny, Fate, and Free Will.

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An Enlightened vision, November 20, 2000

By 

TheIrrationalMan - See all my reviews

This review is from: Jacques the Fatalist and His Master (Paperback)

An entertaining encounter with one of the most fascinating men in the history of letters, Denis Diderot, the "philosophe" and encyclopedist. More of a committed intellectual rather than a conceptual philosopher, he was one of the leading personalities of the movement which was the Enlightenment, with its stress on reason, order and individual liberty. Although strongly imbued with the Enlightenment spirit of naturalistic explanation of phenomena and free enquiry, one notices, in "Jacques the Fatalist" that he was veering from the strict faith in reason (which distinguished his other colleasgues), in favour of a semi-epicurean ethic as he calls reason another of the "whims" of the human race. The novel raises many questions regarding the nature of free will and necessity: Jacques lives in a universe governed by predetermined laws (in which all outcomes are written "up on high") but he acts as though he were free. Some of the antics and stories that transpire with Jacques and the Master provide instances of hilarious, and frequently bawdy, humour. A man who was ahead of his time, Diderot's fiction anticipates, in several ways, the "Nouveau Roman" of the 1950s and the "postmodern" novels of the 1990s in its highly experimental approach to narrative techniques. Sharp-eyed exegetes will also detect pasages that reveal him to be a proto-ecologist, a forerunner of the theories behind modern linguistics and a man whose insights uncannily presaged some of the formulations of the science of sociolgy (e.g. that higher standards of living would lead to a decrease in population.)

17 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Burning Read, December 28, 2001

By 

R. Williams "code slubber" (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Jacques the Fatalist (Oxford World's Classics) (Paperback)

This book is amazing. It will make many of your conceptions of where things belong in the history of the novel fall apart. Not coincidentally, that is one of the points of this book, being an exercise more than a message: that all apparent armatures of order are one more perspective away from disintegration. This book is really quite sneaky as well. In the beginning, the constant references to the inscriptive certainties in the heavens seem silly. But then little explanations come along (like the geneology of Jacques' crazy horse), and the novel heads down a dark, yet very enchanting road, into a fuzz that's every bit as modern as any you've read. This thing alternately looks like Bunuel, Zola, Stendhal, Faulkner, Kerouac. The picaresque, the uncertain narrator, the structuralists, all seem to be swimming around in this amazing book.

Surely many writers and artists from this era (like Goya) depicted the nobles as effete and incapable of carrying out the governance of the most basic requirements of existence, but here, they also appear (in the image of the 'master') as so withdrawn from the world as to be blind. If you take away all the stories that are told, the only thing that's left of a plot here is the master having his horse stolen right from under his nose while Jacques was gone and then Jacques finding it for him at the end in a beautiful, mock sort of deus ex machina.