Tom Jones Book 5, Chapter 1

Of the Serious in Writing, and For What Purpose It Is Introduced

• The parts of Tom Jones that the narrator finds hardest to write are the chapters at the beginning of each book, which lay out a bit of context and theory for this work as a whole.
• He has decided that his novel needs these chapters because that is what he has decided—why do we need more reason than that?
• All of these rules about what can and cannot go into drama just exist so that critics find it easier to take apart other people's work.
• The real job of the critic should be to take notes from the true judgesof artistic merit: the people who actually do the writing.
• Through the ages, though, critics have become more and more powerful.
• They do their best to impose their meaningless rules on literary form, without paying any attention to the substance of people's work.
• That's why our narrator is going to ignore all these critical rules on supposed "good writing."
• He is going to explain the reasonsfor why he is doing certain things with this novel, so that we can judge his project on our own.
• The narrator's main goal is to bring out the very beautiful by showing it in contrast with the deeply ugly.
• The possibilities for comedy in these contrasts are also endless.
• Many artists use this technique, but they don't focus on the theory of it.
• Sometimes the plot needs to slow down and get boring to set off the exciting bits even more.
• So if you hit a patch when things get very serious and dull, you can be sure that's part of the narrator's plan.
• He has to alternate the fun stuff with the less-fun (like this yawn-inducing chapter).