January  UTC  points to you  I had the Zappa quote in mind  Ill 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  Its 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  Thats quite different  If youre familiar with the concept of the unreliable narrator thats who youve got throughout Tale  Its the nonlinearity of it that throws readers really  Its a difficult teaching text for that reason every time you try it some students over half last time I went into it simply dont get it  They want a plot  They want a story  They dont understand why there are all these digressions  The digressions are the tale  The story is a digression from them  If youre 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 wouldnt admit it or modern works like Flann OBriens At SwimTwoBirds or Italo Calvinos disappointing to me If On a Winters Night A Traveller then you wont find the Tale difficult at all  If its a satire of any one thing its 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 its a conspiracy theory  Thats the sort of narrator you have in A Tale of a Tub hes sure that hes right because hes new  Its that kind of thing