The two are traveling to a destination the narrator leaves vague, and to dispel the boredom of the journey Jacques is compelled by his master to recount the story of his loves.

The tales told are usually humorous, with romance or sex as their subject matter, and feature complex characters indulging in deception.

Throughout the work, the narrator refers derisively to sentimental novels and calls attention to the ways in which events develop more realistically in his book.

French critics of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries dismissed it as derivative of Rabelais and Laurence Sterne, as well as unnecessarily bawdy.

Schiller held it in high regard and recommended it strongly to Goethe, who read Jacques in a single sitting.

In the twentieth century, critics such as Leo Spitzer and J. Robert Loy tended to see Jacques as a key work in the tradition of Cervantes and Rabelais, focused on celebrating diversity rather than providing clear answers to philosophical problems.

[8] The novel is written in a similar style, but inverts Jacques' determinism, making the servant instead believe that "Everything in this world happens by accident.