Montaigne is astonished at his own deformity. Astonishment, for him, does not occur because there has been a disruption of the ordinary flow of things, the unexpected emerging against the background of the ordinary. Not just the unexpected startles him by its chance happening: the customary and presumedly permanent background for the appearance of the unexpected is now itself seen as contingent. What astonishes him is the most familiar: the most familiar did not have to be at all. Contingency, not subjectivity, is the fundamental ontological category of Montaigne's self-understanding. Thus Auerbach can say of Montaigne that “among all his contemporaries he had the clearest conception of the problem of one's self-orientation; that is, the task of making oneself at home in existence without fixed points of support.”

Within that context, Auerbach claims that “the tragic is not yet to be found in Montaigne's work.” There is in the Essays nothing of the modern sense of the tragic, the highly personal tragedy of the individual unrestricted by ideas of the cosmos and fate. Auerbach tends to attribute the absence of the tragic to Montaigne's temperament. But it may be equally true to say that Montaigne's character is what it is because the tragic has been, in some ultimate sense, transformed within his self-understanding. Expressed in religious terms, he is presenting us with a picture of what it means to hope.