ABSTRACT
Every reader of Thomas Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller must somehow cope with the disturbing effects of Nashe's preoccupation with physical ugliness and disfigurement. And if physical mutilation and deformity have unsettled and puzzled readers of The Unfortunate Traveller, so too have other enigmatic features resisted critical attempts to explicate the work along structural or generic lines. There is a "plot," of course, but it meanders haphazardly through episodes, descriptions, and anecdotes that appear to be extraneous and irrelevant to the progress of the narrative. Commentators who have approached the work as satire have found to their dismay that Nashe's satire is inconsistentWilton will emphasize Italianate vice and immorality in one passage, and praise Italian courtesy in another. Similarly, Jack's role as narrator tends to defy classification and easy interpretation: he is alternately prankster, satirist, travel-writer, polemicist, historian, picaro, fictional autobiographer. And even the feature that is most often recommended by readers of N ashe-his prose style-presents certain difficulties as well. The excesses of Nashe's language, his outrageous similes and comparisons, his penchant for the verbal elaboration of the trivial, his vitriolic descriptions-all these appear to exist for their own sake, at the expense of form, plot, structure, and characterization.
