As a satire, the tone of A Sentimental Journey is predictably sarcastic and snarky, though Sterne maintains a lighthearted sense of whimsy throughout. The tone is set at the very beginning of the novel:
Strange! quoth I, debating the matter with myself, That one and twenty miles sailing, for ’tis absolutely no further from Dover to Calais, should give a man these rights—I’ll look into them: so giving up the argument— I went straight to my lodgings, put up half a dozen shirts […]—“the coat I have on, said I, looking at the sleeve, will do”—took a place in the Dover stage; and the packet sailing at nine the next morning—by three I had got sat down to my dinner upon a fricassee’d chicken so incontestably in France, that had I died that night of an indigestion …
In one breath, Yorick whisks the reader from his inner thoughts on the authority that travel lends him to his description of packing for his voyage to his description of his visceral first meal that night in France. It's playful and frantic, and Yorick's self-importance is immediately clear—setting the groundwork for Sterne's satirical presentation of Yorick's aggrandizing sentimentality in the rest of the novel.
