`, 15 January 2008 (UTC) :+10 points to you!  I had the Zappa quote in mind.  (I'll be by to award the points.)  Yes, it has a great deal to say to modern man.  The issues of indeterminacy that you see in Bk III of GT are mainly featured.  It's also a more subtle satire, because it claims to explain why the CoE is the best, but ends up saying, ``The CoE is not as bad as the others.``  That's quite different.  If you're familiar with the concept of the unreliable narrator, that's who you've got throughout Tale.  It's the non-linearity of it that throws readers, really.  It's a difficult teaching text for that reason: every time you try it, some students (over half, last time I went into it) simply ``don't get it.``  They want a plot.  They want a story.  They don't understand why there are all these digressions.  (The digressions are the tale.  The story is a digression from them.)  If you're at home with anarchic works like Tristram Shandy (which was modeled on Tale in many ways) or Sartor Resartus (which is even more explicitly modeled on Tale, although, unlike Sterne, Carlyle wouldn't admit it), or modern works like Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds or Italo Calvino's (disappointing, to me) If On a Winter's Night A Traveller, then you won't find the Tale difficult at all.  If it's a satire of any one thing, it's a satire of being unable to read metaphors properly.  That and the credulity. :Imagine a person who reads all of the web, and only the web, and believes everything he reads, but only if it's a conspiracy theory.  That's the sort of narrator you have in A Tale of a Tub: he's sure that he's right, because he's new.  It's that kind of thing.    22:22`