Birth of the Novel
In a hundred and fifty years the novel goes from parody to documentary illusion to self-destruction, and the toolbox is already complete: the found document, the ordinary fallible hero, the author winking through the page. Five books, one continuous argument about whether fiction has to pretend it isn't fiction.
Don QuixoteMiguel de Cervantes · 1605
Lvl 6940ppCervantes mocks chivalric romance so thoroughly the mockery becomes something unprecedented: a long prose narrative about an ordinary, deluded, deeply human person. The founding act.
Robinson CrusoeDaniel Defoe · 1719
Lvl 4304ppDefoe's castaway insists, in flat convincing first-person prose, that every word is true. It isn't, and the lie (ledgers, dates, inventories) is the whole new invention.
Moll FlandersDaniel Defoe · 1722
Lvl 5368ppDefoe's slipperier follow-up: a thief and survivor who makes her own case so persuasively you stop cross-examining it. The novel has learned to lie fluently.
A Sentimental Journey Through France and ItalyLaurence Sterne · 1768
Lvl 5160ppSterne turns travel writing into pure digression and feeling-for-its-own-sake: a warm-up for the joke he's about to blow wide open.
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, GentlemanLaurence Sterne · 1759
Lvl 9560ppThe capstone: Sterne's narrator tries to tell his own life story and can't get past his own birth for volumes, typographic games and digressions that prove the novel was never innocent to begin with.