Kundera firmly stated: «The writer is inscribed in the spiritual map Phone Number List his time, of his nation, in that of the history of ideas. The only context in which the value of a novel can be grasped is that of the novel's history. The novelist does not have to be accountable to anyone, except Cervantes. The same names that marked his youth are repeated: Rabelais, Cervantes, Diderot and Sterne. They embody what he calls "the first half-time of the novel.
In that first half, the writer continues playing with forms. Plausibility is not an absolute criterion: Sancho Panza may lose 103 teeth and the narrator of Jacques the Fatalist forgets to mention the battle in which Jacques was wounded in the knee. Such casualness is unimaginable in Balzac or Zola. Meanwhile, the canons of the novel genre have changed, and with them, the times. Cervantes and Diderot enjoyed great freedom; They did not feel obliged to tell everything, even what they found annoying.