The narrator actually insists that the story of Jacques and his master is true, and that he intends to stick to the facts as he knows them. Thomas Kavanaugh claims, however, that Diderot’s narrator presents a pile of alternative storylines from which he then chooses whichever one suits him best: “… a choice must be made. At some point this arbitrary diversity must be sacrificed to a single direction. Authorial disponability must be actualized toward narratorial determination” (26). Lilian Furst is also of the opinion that everything that happens in the story of Jacques and his master, for this reason, appears abitrary (i.e. fictional) to the reader (178).