 Le Rêve de D’Alembert is also concerned with the relation between author, textual characters, and the naturalistic and rational representation of thought in language and text, as is Le Neveu de Rameau, but while these dialogues organize the play between their various registers in a way that produces constructive philosophical investigation, Jacques le fataliste operates deconstructively, subverting the basic coherence of the novel as a form by repeating paragraphs verbatim on multiple pages and by intentionally distorting the book’s narrative coherence and flow. One entire page of the book is printed in complete black, for example, to call attention to the print characters that make all reading and linguistic communication possible. Diderot’s story Ceci n’est pas un conte also operates in this subversive and deconstructive way by prefiguring Magritte’s famous conundrum regarding the image of a pipe through a self-destructive recursion of a story that uses storytelling to deny the possibility of storytelling even as it narrates a story.