 The same combination is present in Diderot’s literary fiction as well in his continual, and often critical, exploration of the empirical reality of linguistic representation, and our capacities and limitations for experiencing and knowing the world through such representations. Jacques le fataliste, for example, is a kind of anti-novel that thwarts the arrival of naturalized realism and credible illusion at every turn even as it narrates a bawdy and frolicking story. Characters break with the scenes and dialogue of the story to talk directly to the reader, and the narrator himself is a self-conscious character in the work who often finds himself in a struggle with the fictions he is supposedly controlling and representing for his readers.