Ideal Friendship and the Paradoxes of Narration in Sarah Fielding's David Simple

Sarah Fielding's The Adventures of David Simple and David Simple, Volume the Last engage with the social category of real friendship not only in representations of character ties, but also in the development of a third-person narrator that works to embody ideal amity through a triangulation of the reader's attitude towards characters. In contrasting instances of true and false friendship, the novels generate a radical scepticism that the narrator must deflect by managing access to characters in a manner that stimulates the reader's faith in their affections. The narrator's performance of friendship towards character and reader generates contradictions around the epistemology of knowing other minds, the ethics of friendly intimacy, and power relations between writer and audience. In this article, I argue that Fielding's technique suggests the broader significance of ideal friendship as a privileged moral concept for the history of eighteenth-century fiction.