ABSTRACT
If, as Bakhtin suggests, the chronotope of the road dominates early adventure novels of everyday life, the digressive comic fiction of the early modern era finds the inn and the road battling for any monopoly the road may previously have enjoyed. This battle simultaneously reflects the tension in prose fiction between (to borrow Tristram's terms) the digressive and progressive modes of narrative discourse. Don Quijote regards the inn as an irrelevance, a distraction from the chivalric adventures he seeks, and he proves to be correct in this regard as he is consigned to the background for much of his time there. Similarly, the Biche in the Roman comique constitutes an anti-progressive space, in which burlesque misadventures and communal entertainments divert the narrative from the pursuit of its romanesque course. The Odyssean theme of impeded nostos looms over many of the fictions discussed above, and the inn has an important part to play in luring travellers away from the road home. Josephs homeward journey is characterized by the manner in which he is repeatedly 'bounced' from the road to the inn. The ostensible protagonists of these works, from Don Quijote to Joseph to Jacques and his master, find the attention shifting from their stories to those rooted in the domestic life of the inn—to the chambermaids and shrewish innkeeper's wives who often run these inns with little help from the innkeeper himself, and, of course, to the other guests. In Jacques, the inn thus provides an oasis from the world outside by turning the world outside into a story.
