Joseph’s discovered identity on the morrow brings together the ridiculous and the amiable.  The ridiculous characters Beau and Slipslop are still frustrated from fulfilling their desire for Fanny and Joseph.  The amiable Parson Adams maintains the miraculous, otherworldly nature of Joseph and Fanny’s good luck.  How is Joseph’s discovered identity ‘natural,’ though?
He has yet to shake his unnatural identity of a chastened Priapus.  He proposes to Fanny his melancholic purpose to live a life of virtuous detachment from his frustrated ideal.  Yet, Joseph has not yet discovered his real, natural identity, for he learns the following morning that he is actually the son of a Mr. Wilson, and thus, not actually related to Fanny Andrews.  He has finally uncovered his true identity: he can start a very normal, common life.  The ending refers to the classic formulation of dramatic comedy, in which a “comedy” is a play whose conclusion is fitting and natural to the characters’ true identity.
With the final humorous identity discovery in Joseph Andrews, unlike the confused identity in the main character(s) at the conclusion of the Satyricon, there is no question of whether the main character is able to reverse the Priapic curse that overshadows his identity.  Indeed, the narrator concludes the book with a glimpse into the happily-married lovers’ bedroom on their wedding night, and informs us that Fanny is already pregnant: in other words, Joseph’s virtuous marriage to Fanny is quite fecund.  Unlike the title character of Don Quixote, the main character(s) of Joseph Andrews do not reject any imaginative fancies that have given them their original identity.  Indeed, Joseph, his wife, and Parson Adams all get to realize their ideals: Adams, a quiet job in the country, and the couple, a stable and fertile family.  The sum of various comic identity discoveries, put together, corresponds to a summary of the various ways to discover comedy, an important aspect of the novel as Henry Fielding conceived it: a “comic epic poem in prose.”
Louise Cowan’s introduction to The Terrain of Comedy explores the cosmic imagination in terms of four genres: lyric, tragedy, comedy, and epic.  Cowan suggests that there are three realms of the comic terrain, Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso.  In Inferno comedy, “the pretty girl … is either absent or … victimized ….  Natural pleasure, such as feasting or love-making, is diseased or distorted”.  The characters of Slipslop and Beau Didapper abound in this realm.  In Purgatorio comedy, “the pretty girl is yearned for, though not to be possessed”.  This stage of comedy has its center in the identity of Joseph and Fanny Andrews.  Finally, in paradisal comedy, “grace and forgiveness supplant even mercy ….
I will open with some remarks concerning the genre of the novel in general, which will establish a critical vocabulary relevant to Fielding’s conception of ‘the art of the novel.’  I will continue throughout this opening to place Henry Fielding’s conception of the genre of the novel in terms of ‘comedy’ with emphasis on Joseph Andrews (1742), in context of that general discussion, including references to other works considered to be early ‘novels.’  Then, I will examine Joseph Andrews as a specimen of Fielding’s comic genre, centering my argument on how Fielding defines his characters as ‘answers’ to their literary origins or precedents.  I will conclude by bringing the discussion full circle, examining some implications the comic strain of novel theory as Henry Fielding portrays in Joseph Andrews presents for the theory of the novel in general and for contemporary fiction.
