In J. Robert Loy's smooth and accurate translation (the first in English except for a privately printed one of 1798), the reader can now discover the originality of Diderot's witty masterpiece. It is a book that no one interested in the evolution of modern fiction, or the ideas of the Enlightenment, will want to miss.
What happens on the journey? Jacques tells his master his adventures; this story in turn is constantly interrupted by other stories or by Diderot, as narrator, who comes in to tease the reader about the future course of the novel. Diderot is eager to be agreeable, so long as the reader realizes that the fabricator of a novel can as easily proceed in this way as in that. The book foreshadows a number of 19th and 20th century literary techniques, exchanging the rational and classical for shifting perspectives of time, personality, and viewpoint.
