A Sentimental Journey

by

Laurence Sterne

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Sentimentality Theme Analysis

Themes and Colors
Sentimentality Theme Icon
Travel Theme Icon
Sexuality and Kindness Theme Icon
National vs. Personal Identity Theme Icon
Religion Theme Icon
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in A Sentimental Journey, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Sentimentality Theme Icon

Throughout A Sentimental Journey, the author, Laurence Sterne, seems to satirize sentimentality by showing his characters emoting melodramatically over silly things. Both Yorick (the narrator) and the characters he meets frequently indulge in inappropriate, disproportionate emotional responses. Early in the novel, Yorick sees an abandoned one-person carriage called a Desobligeant in the coach-yard of the hotel-master Monsieur Dessein. Imagining a whole adventurous history for the carriage, Yorick works himself into an intense sympathy with the abandoned carriage and scolds Monsieur Dessein for not selling the carriage to another traveler. As carriages don’t have feelings, Sterne is clearly mocking Yorick’s overactive sympathy. A little later, Yorick meets a German traveler, whose sons have died of smallpox, weeping and mourning a death—not of his sons, but of a donkey he believed was his friend. Again, Sterne is clearly satirizing the German traveler’s misplaced sentimentality, which leads him to mourn an animal while recounting the death of his own sons quite matter-of-factly. Incidents such as these—in which characters have comically intense emotional reactions to less important events while ignoring more important ones—recur throughout A Sentimental Journey.

Despite Sterne’s satire of overblown sentiment, however, other moments in A Sentimental Journey suggest that emotion helps us understand the world. Indeed, at some moments, Yorick’s sentimentality leads him to a truer understanding of the world. When Yorick realizes that the French police may imprison him for entering France without a passport, he at first minimizes the danger he is in, trying to convince himself that prison wouldn’t be so bad. Shortly after, he encounters a caged starling that repeats the phrase “I can’t get out.” Yorick’s intense sentimental reaction to the caged starling makes him realize how terrible imprisonment would be and motivates him to seek help with his passport. With his freedom threatened, Yorick also comes to a moral understanding of the evils of slavery. Thus, in A Sentimental Journey, Sterne satirizes overblown sentiment but illustrates how appropriate emotional responses can improve people’s understanding of the world.

Related Themes from Other Texts
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Sentimentality ThemeTracker

The ThemeTracker below shows where, and to what degree, the theme of Sentimentality appears in each volume of A Sentimental Journey. Click or tap on any chapter to read its Summary & Analysis.
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Sentimentality Quotes in A Sentimental Journey

Below you will find the important quotes in A Sentimental Journey related to the theme of Sentimentality.
Volume 1 Quotes

When man is at peace with man, how much lighter than a feather is the heaviest of metals in his hand! he pulls out his purse, and holding it airily and uncompress’d, looks round him, as if he sought for an object to share it with[.]

Related Characters: Yorick (The Narrator) (speaker), Franciscan Monk (Father Lorenzo)
Related Literary Devices:
Page Number: 6
Explanation and Analysis:

I have behaved very ill; said I within myself; but I have only just set out upon my travels, and shall learn better manners as I get along.

Related Characters: Yorick (The Narrator) (speaker), Franciscan Monk (Father Lorenzo)
Page Number: 10
Explanation and Analysis:

Now where would be the harm, said I to myself, if I was to beg of this distressed lady to accept of half of my chaise?—and what mighty mischief could ensue?

Related Characters: Yorick (The Narrator) (speaker), Madame de L—, Eliza
Page Number: 22-23
Explanation and Analysis:

I pity the man who can travel from Dan to Beersheba, and cry, ‘Tis all barren—and so it is, and so is all the world to him who will not cultivate the fruits it offers. I declare, said I, clapping my hands chearily together, that was I in a desart, I would find out wherewith in it to call forth my affections[.]

Related Characters: Yorick (The Narrator) (speaker)
Page Number: 28
Explanation and Analysis:

The pauvre honteux could say nothing—he pull’d out a little handkerchief, and wiped his face as he turned away—and I thought he thank’d me more than them all.

Related Characters: Yorick (The Narrator) (speaker)
Related Symbols: Handkerchiefs
Page Number: 36-37
Explanation and Analysis:
Volume 2 Quotes

The mind sits terrified at the objects she has magnified herself, and blackened: reduce them to their proper size and hue she overlooks them[.]

Related Characters: Yorick (The Narrator) (speaker), La Fleur
Related Symbols: Starling
Page Number: 69
Explanation and Analysis:

Disguise thyself as thou wilt, still slavery! said I—still thou art a bitter draught; and though thousands in all ages have been made to drink of thee, thou art no less bitter on that account.

Related Characters: Yorick (The Narrator) (speaker)
Related Symbols: Starling
Page Number: 69-70
Explanation and Analysis:

I was going to begin with the millions of my fellow creatures born to no inheritance but slavery; but finding, however affecting the picture was, that I could not bring it near me, and that the multitude of sad groups in it did but distract me.—

—I took a single captive, and having first shut him up in his dungeon, I then look’d through the twilight of his grated door to take his picture.

Related Characters: Yorick (The Narrator) (speaker)
Related Symbols: Starling
Page Number: 70
Explanation and Analysis:

But there is nothing unmixt in this world; and some of the gravest of our divines have carried it so far as to affirm, that enjoyment itself was attended even with a sigh—and that the greatest they knew of, terminated in a general way, in little better than a convulsion.

Related Characters: Yorick (The Narrator) (speaker), Count de B****
Page Number: 85
Explanation and Analysis:

I told Madame de V*** it might be her principle; but I was sure it could not be her interest to level the outworks, without which I could not conceive how such a citadel as hers could be defended—that there was not a more dangerous thing in the world, than for a beauty to be a deist—that it was a debt I owed my creed, not to conceal it from her—that I had not been five minutes sat upon the sopha besides her, but I had begun to form designs—and what is it, but the sentiments of religion, and the persuasion they had existed in her breast, which could have check’d them as they rose up.

Related Characters: Yorick (The Narrator) (speaker), Count de B****
Related Literary Devices:
Page Number: 106
Explanation and Analysis:

I sat down close by her; and Maria let me wipe them away as they fell with my handkerchief.—I then steep’d it with my own—and then in hers—and then in mine—and then I wip’d hers again—and as I did it, I felt such indescribable emotions within me, as I am sure could not be accounted for from any combinations of matter and motion.

I am positive I have a soul; nor can all the books with which materialists have pester’d the world ever convince me of the contrary.

Related Characters: Yorick (The Narrator) (speaker), Maria
Related Symbols: Handkerchiefs
Page Number: 108
Explanation and Analysis:

Dear sensibility! source inexhausted of all that’s precious in our joys, or costly in our sorrows! thou chainest thy martyr down upon his bed of straw—and ‘tis thou who lifts him up to HEAVEN—eternal fountain of our feelings!—‘tis here I trace thee—and this is thy divinity which stirs within me […] that I feel some generous joys and generous cares beyond myself—all comes from thee, great—great SENSORIUM of the world!

Related Characters: Yorick (The Narrator) (speaker), Maria
Page Number: 111
Explanation and Analysis: