At the same time it wants unity and coherence, it attains no conclusion, and the author abuses his digressive method of composition and his convenient fiction of hiatuses in the original manuscript.
They are the presentment of all his ideas and scenes in the plainest and most direct language, the frequent employ ment of colloquial forms of speech, the constant insertion of little material details and illustrations, often of a more or less digressive form, and, in his historico-fictitious works, as well as in his novels, the most rigid attention to vivacity and consistency of character.
It is in this incidental and digressive way that we get the description of the Gospel in i.
The narrative structure is essentially digressive, building the characters through vignettes that weave together fragments, marginal notes, and asides.
In the first volume, anticipating an obvious complaint, he had protested against digressions that left the main work to stand still, and had boasted - not without justice in a Shandean sense - that he had reconciled digressive motion with progressive.