SOURCE: "A Comic Novel," in Gil Blas, Grant & Cutler Ltd., 1988, pp. 45-58.

In the following essay, Cook examines the comic elements in Gil Blas by concentrating on several targets of the novel's satire—including the judicial system, the medical profession, and the theatrical world—and the title character's encounters with their intrinsic hypocrisy and artificiality.

If Lesage's novel can still be read with pleasure today it is essentially because of the author's comic vision. Lesage managed to produce a work which is both general and specific in its comedy, treating both types and individuals, dealing with what is comic in reality and producing imagined scenes of wit and insight. The ironical position of the narrator is one obvious source of comedy: we laugh at Gil when he expects us to, but we also laugh when he expects it least. Lesage sees that the world is intrinsically comic: people...