Laurence Sterne a fair amount to certain pioneering novels that paved the way for comedy in prose writing. One such novel is Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote, which is very similar in its satirical tone to A Sentimental Journey. As if to show its influence, Sterne makes a number of allusions to Don Quixote throughout his work.
In Volume 1, at the opening of the novel, as Sterne reflects on the trials and tribulations of travel, he paraphrases from Quixote:
I am of opinion, That a man would act as wisely, if he could prevail upon himself, to live contented without foreign knowledge or foreign improvements, especially if he lives in a country that has no absolute want of either—and indeed, much grief of heart has it oft and many a time cost me, when I have observed how many a foul step the inquisitive Traveller has measured to see sights and look into discoveries; all which, as Sancho Pança said to Don Quixote, they might have seen dry-shod at home.
Sterne offers up his warning by invoking the hectic misadventures of Sancho Panza and Don Quixote, the main characters of Cervantes's work: they may have been "dry-shod," or with dry shoes (which is to say, more comfortable) if they had never left home.
Another early example of an allusion to Don Quixote comes in the section "The Dead Ass," from Volume 1, when Yorick observes the German man mourning his donkey:
I thought by the accent, it had been an apostrophe to his child; but ’twas to his ass, and to the very ass we had seen dead in the road, which had occasioned La Fleur’s misadventure. The man seemed to lament it much; and it instantly brought into my mind Sancho’s lamentation for his; but he did it with more true touches of nature.
Here, Yorick references Sancho Panza's and his eulogy for his stolen donkey, when he finds the German man mourning the dead donkey that he has just passed on the road.
A Sentimental Journey is a book full of allusions, which become a way for Sterne to acknowledge the work that has influenced him—as well as the work that he scorns. Sterne is keenly aware of his work’s place in a growing canon of comedic novels, and, in particular, the canon of comedic novels that deal with travel and adventure.
Throughout A Sentimental Journey, Sterne makes reference to “Smelfungus,” a traveler who embodies the worst possible form of travel, in Sterne’s view: he is predisposed to dislike everything and is closed off to the world and new experiences. Sterne introduces Smelfungus to the reader in Volume 1, satirizing him quite openly:
The learned SMELFUNGUS travelled from Boulogne to Paris— from Paris to Rome—and so on—but he set out with the spleen and jaundice, and every object he pass’d by was discoloured or distorted— He wrote an account of them, but ’twas nothing but the account of his miserable feelings.
Smelfungus is the satirical version of the real Tobias Smollett, himself a novelist and travel writer. By making this allusion to Smollett, Sterne provides a ruthless critique of Smollett's small-minded conception of travel, and Sterne continues his satire of Smollett’s travelogues with the introduction of another traveler, Mundungus, who also has an over-the-top bad attitude:
Mundungus, with an immense fortune, made the whole tour; going on from Rome to Naples—from Naples to Venice—from Venice to Vienna—to Dresden, to Berlin, without one generous connection or pleasurable anecdote to tell of; but he had travell’d straight on looking neither to his right hand or his left, lest Love or Pity should seduce him out of his road.
A Sentimental Journey is, among other things, an exploration of the meaning and merits of travel—and in Sterne's view, Smollett's opinion of traveling was antithetical to Sterne's own vision of traveling as source of self-reflection, knowledge, and connection with the world. Smelfungus and Mundungus are closed off to new experiences, and they are worse off because of this attitude.
In Volume 1, as Yorick begins his travels in France, he comes across a begging monk. Sterne's satirical description of the monk, and Yorick's reaction to him, is put into the language of Baroque painting:
It was one of those heads, which Guido has often painted—mild, pale—penetrating, free from all common-place ideas of fat contented ignorance looking downwards upon the earth—it look’d forwards; but look’d, as if it look’d at something beyond this world. How one of his order came by it, heaven above, who let it fall upon a monk’s shoulders, best knows: but it would have suited a Bramin, and had I met it upon the plains of Indostan, I had reverenced it.
Yorick opens his appraisal of the monk with an allusion to the Italian painter Guido Reni, whose own travels and studies abroad were a source of inspiration to travel writers including Tobias Smollett (the writer lampooned by Sterne as “Smelfungus” in A Sentimental Journey). The invocation of this painter to describe the monk invites the images of Guido’s baroque figuration of angels and biblical scenes—full of characters who "look down upon the earth" with "fat contented ignorance"—into the reader's imagination.
This description is satirical in at least two ways: first, it satirizes Yorick’s own attitude to travel—he preaches openness, inclusivity, and an earnest willingness to learn from new experiences, only to shut down immediately when confronted by the monk at the very beginning of his journey. This passage is only the beginning of his derisive scorn, but his disgust for the monk is as humorous as it is over-the-top. Second, his surprise that a monk should seem otherworldly and have a gaze that looks into the “beyond” also satirizes the self-importance of Christian monastic practices. Who, Yorick exclaims to himself, could have let such a visage “fall upon a monk’s shoulders”?
Just a bit later, the description of the monk continues, also in the metaphorical language of painting as a means to characterize the monk:
The rest of his outline may be given in a few strokes; one might put it into the hands of any one to design, for ’twas neither elegant or otherwise, but as character and expression made it so: it was a thin, spare form, something above the common size, if it lost not the distinction by a bend forwards in the figure—but it was the attitude of Intreaty; and as it now stands presented to my imagination, it gain’d more than it lost by it.
As opposed to the monk's head, which appeared to Yorick straight out of a Guido painting, his body is less specific—"any one" could have designed it, and the features are not particularly notable other than the figure's general attitude of "Intreaty," or earnest pleading.
This interaction, at the outset of the novel, sets the tone for the adventure to come. Although A Sentimental Journey is an exploration of travel and Christian virtue, Yorick expresses ambivalence to the point of satire—and certainly hypocrisy—about such virtue.
In Volume 1 of A Sentimental Journey, in the section “A Fragment,” Sterne adapts an account of the performance of Andromeda, a lost play by the Greek playwright Euripedes, from the English author Robert Burton’s 1621 novel The Anatomy of Melancholy. This fragmented story opens with a description of the town of Abdera, in which Andromeda was to be performed:
THE town of Abdera, notwithstanding Democritus lived there trying all the powers of irony and laughter to reclaim it, was the vilest and most profligate town in all Thrace. What for poisons, conspiracies, and assassinations—libels, pasquinades and tumults, there was no going there by day—'twas worse by night.
This allusion to Democritus establishes a parallel between Sterne and Democritus himself, an ancient philosopher who used irony and satire to emphasize the ridiculousness of the human condition—not unlike Sterne’s own study of the human condition through this satirical account of Yorick’s travels and various misadventures.
The chapter goes on to focus on how this historical performance of Andromeda, in which Perseus gives a rousing speech on the power of love, inspires the brutal Abderians to choose love over war. Perhaps Sterne intended this fragment to be a microcosm of his novel’s exploration of the power—and divinity—of romance and sexuality and its intended effect on the reader.
References to Hamlet abound in A Sentimental Journey, stimulated first and foremost by the protagonist's own name: Yorick is also the name of the deceased court jester whose skull Prince Hamlet famously holds in contemplation during his speech in Act 5, Scene 1 of that play. Sterne makes a direct allusion to this speech in Volume 1:
Alas, poor Yorick! cried I, what art thou doing here? On the very first onset of all this glittering clatter, thou art reduced to an atom—seek—seek some winding alley, with a tourniquet at the end of it, where chariot never rolled or flambeau shot its rays—there though mayest solace thy soul in converse sweet with some kind grisset of a barber's wife, and get into such coteries!—
Sterne's Yorick says this to himself when he feels overwhelmed and insecure upon his arrival in Paris, but the line "Alas, poor Yorick!" is a direct quote from the opening of Hamlet's speech.
Later, in Volume 2, Count B*** reveals to Yorick the Shakespearian origins of his name—of which Yorick is somehow unaware. Ultimately, it will be a confusion between Sterne's Yorick and Shakespeare's Yorick that enables Sterne's Yorick—who has illegally traveled to France—to get a legally issued passport.
The association of Yorick with a jester from Hamlet (albeit a dead one) makes sense, given the great comedy of Yorick’s travels detailed in A Sentimental Journey. Like the Shakespearean fool, Yorick holds up an exaggerated, satirical mirror to reality in the hopes of depicting it in its full, ridiculous truths.
