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Essay / Nature and Purpose of Digression in Joseph Andrews by Henry Fielding It is perhaps a development of Henry Fielding's verbose writing style that he includes so many digressions in the pages of Joseph Andrews. As an author, he is certainly not afraid to slow the pace of his narrative to develop a moral point, and while this most often replaces a paragraph or two in the main story, he sometimes devotes entire chapters to subjects. which have no relation to the development of the plot but which expound ethical or theological ideas related to the themes of the text as a whole. Furthermore, at the beginning of the first three books, Fielding himself comments on certain aspects of literary art, in digressions (perhaps prefaces would be a better term) which are fundamentally different in nature from all the others in this sense to explore ideas. relevant to the construction of the book itself, rather than its themes. They cover topics such as why the book is written, the benefits of dividing a book into chapters, and the wonders of biography as a literary form; and can almost be seen as an explanation by the author of why he wrote the book as he did, rather than providing any development of the themes of the text themselves. Something that is true of all the major digressions in the text is that they all occur, to some extent, to relieve the reader: Leonora's story is told directly after an intense theological discussion; Wilson's tale after a fairly long chapter containing "several wonderful adventures"; the discourse between the poet and the player after a chapter "containing surprising and bloody Adventures", and the final digression, that of...... middle of paper...... isolated ideas, but ideas which are part integral to the plot and, as such, helps us better understand the story as a whole. The digression recounted by The Poet and the Gambler, for example, speaks to the nature of plays and poetry and their quality as seen in contemporary theaters; this is developed later in the next chapter, where a discussion takes place between Adams and Joseph regarding the performing arts. As usual, Fielding sees no reason not to point out this connection directly to us, as he writes at the end of the digression: "the next chapter... is a sort of counterpart to this." This relevance to the book as a whole is common to all the digressions, to Leonora's tale exploring loyalty, to Wilson's tale exploring personal reform and forgiveness, and to Lennard and Paul's tale exploring honesty, all of which are themes entirely appropriate to the text..
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