1. The
action of Book II starts with Mr. Adams finding himself in what will become a
highly characteristic predicament: he lacks the funds to pay the bill he has racked
up at the inn. Mr. Adams, like Fielding himself at the time of composing the novel,
is constantly in debt; fortunately, however, the same unworldliness that leads to
these bouts of insolvency prevents him from despairing. Instead, he asks
trustingly for help, for as he himself would never refuse a request for financial
assistance, he always expects that others will lend him the money he needs. In
this particular instance, the people around him reward his faith: a servant from
the coach and six springs Adams and Joseph from the inn, and later Mrs. Slipslop
(albeit with a less than virtuous motive) releases the parson's horse and Joseph
along with it.
No less characteristic of Adams is his having forgotten his manuscripts at home;
as the episode of his wading needlessly through a stream suggests, Mr. Adams is
prone to these errors because he is both literally and figuratively short-sighted.
The detail of his sitting down to read the works of the classical tragedian Æschylus
gives a clue as to the literary influences behind Fielding's characterizing him in
this way. Mr. Adams resembles Cervantes's Don Quixote in having a vision that is
naïve in a peculiarly bookish way: as Homer Goldberg observes, Adams's continual
horror at the wickedness of others arises not only from his own natural goodness,
which he tends to project onto others, but also from his assumption that "the
noble sentiments of the ancient poets and philosophers . . . delineate human
nature as it is, rather than as it might or ought to be." Thus, the story moves from
examples of Adams's absent-mindedness (with respect to money, manuscripts,
and moving water) straight to an incident in which a couple of worldlings display a
less exalted side of human nature: while stopping at the next inn, Adams is
shocked to learn that two litigious gentlemen would allow self-interest to guide
their moral judgments of others. Mr. Adams errs in confusing erudition with
practical wisdom and insight into the minds and actions of everyday human
beings; this lack of emphasis on the practical side of things manifests itself in his
forgetfulness, his accumulation of debt, and his idealistic expectation of good faith
in others.
The first chapter of Book II, like that of Book I, contains Fielding's commentary on
his procedure as a novelist; here, he addresses his division of the novel into books
and chapters that allow the reader to pause for reflection. Fielding claims once
again to be taking his cues from classical writers such as Homer, and indeed the
use of numbered books is an organizational technique typical of the epic. Another
structural inheritance from the epic, one that Fielding does not discuss, is the
interpolation of digressive tales such as that of Leonora, which begins in Chapter
IV. Readers who are inclined to criticize the weakness of Fielding's plot structure,
with its many improbable occurrences and flat characters popping in and out,
often disapprove of these digressions as distractions from the main story.

2. Nevertheless, the tales do serve the main narrative, as the telling of Leonora's
demonstrates: not only does the characterization of Mr. Adams gather an amusing
new wrinkle (as the upright clergyman turns out to be an avid consumer of
gossipy stories), but Leonora's biography underscores important themes as well.
Some critics have called the digressive tales "negative analogues," meaning that
they express negatively the positive moral themes of the main story. Thus, while
Joseph and Fanny embody everything that young lovers ought to be and do,
Leonora manages to get everything wrong. The fact that she begins with every
earthly advantage makes her folly all the less forgivable: she is wealthy,
attractive, popular, and shrewd; her only weakness is a moral one, as she brings
to her selection of husbands a form of pragmatism that is really just applied
selfishness. This pragmatism misfires when Leonora abandons the man she really
loves for a wealthier man who, as will be seen in the conclusion of her story, is no
less self-interested than she is. For being too clever by half, the novel punishes
Leonora, rewarding instead the dogged loyalty of Joseph and Fanny; the contrast
between her sophistication and their straightforwardness implies that Fielding's
providence favors simplicity, which Fielding considers an attribute of goodness.
Fielding's classical influences manifest themselves also in the farcical battle scene
of Chapter V: serious epics are full of lavishly detailed scenes of combat that
substantiate the heroic qualities of the participants, but in Fielding the narrative
specificity serves, of course, not to glorify the action but to underscore its
ludicrousness. Naturally, Mr. Adams epitomizes this ludicrousness: the Hostess
dashes the hog's blood into his face "with so good an Aim, that much the greater
part first saluting his Countenance, trickled thence in so large a current down his
Beard, and over his Garments, that a more horrible Spectacle was hardly to be
seen or even imagined"; when the smoke has cleared, "[t]he principal Figure, and
which engaged the Eyes of all, was Adams," who, as usual, looks the silliest. He
does not, however, descend to the level of the guiltiest: the hog's blood battle
provides a useful window into Fielding's ethics, and the fact that neither Adams
nor Joseph thinks of turning the other cheek indicates that Fielding does not use
violence and nonviolence as a basis on which to distinguish the wicked characters
from the virtuous. Whether a particular violent act is ethical or not turns out to be
a question of motive: the Host has threatened the two travelers because he is
irritated with Adams and Joseph for requesting charity from his wife and because
he resents Joseph's suggestion that Adams is his social superior; by contrast, the
violence of Adams and Joseph is simply reactive, part self-defense and part
retaliation against the Host's gratuitous aggression. In Fielding's world, where
where violence is normative, even the best Christians cannot be pacifists.