Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Tristram Shandy, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Truth, Fiction, and Storytelling
Language and Comprehension
Travel, Space, and Time
Sexuality and Propriety
Science, Technology, and the Enlightenment
Summary
Analysis
Dedication. Addressing the “Right Honorable” Mr. Pitt, Tristram opens his first volume with a note explaining his rural living situation and poor health. He describes his efforts to keep his spirits up through wit and laughter, which is also the goal of his book. He hopes Mr. Pitt will make use of the book to that end.
Tristram’s dedication is not just a politically correct nod to the leading statesman William Pitt: it also foreshadows the book’s concern with both humor and literary subversion. Indeed, most novels’ dedications are written by the author, not the narrator, and so Tristram’s description of his own illness establishes from the very beginning what a thin line there is between Tristram Shandy and Laurence Sterne.
Themes
Chapter 1. Tristram wishes his parents had been more thoughtful in creating him and criticizes them for not being more attentive. He believes that the circumstances of his gestation affected his temperament and personality, particularly in form of his humors and animal spirits, and he muses on how he could have been different. Indeed, Tristram believes that these parts of his personality exert a greater influence upon his life than his conscious thinking. At the moment of Tristram’s conception, Tristram’s mother interrupts Tristram’s father to ask if he wound up their clock.
Subverting the typical structure of memoirs, Tristram begins with his conception instead of his birth. Invoking scientific theories of humors and animal spirits, Tristram suggests that his current condition is at least partly caused by his parents’ haphazard creation of him: that is, the unsatisfactory sex act during which his father impregnated his mother, when Mrs. Shandy interrupted her husband at the moment of climax.
Themes
Chapter 2. Tristram continues, explaining how the homunculus formed at his conception lacked the proper animal spirits to guide its development, as his mother’s interjection dispersed them. Tristram then argues that the homunculus too has rights, and he bemoans what happened to his own homunculus, which reached birth in a weakened state without the proper animal spirits to help it grow.
Tristram quickly segues from a mock-scientific description of his conception to a mock-legal one, arguing that his parents’ carelessness trampled on the rights of his homunculus. This is the first of the novel’s many irreverent adoptions of specialized ideas and ways of speaking, which the reader will soon find to be a key feature of Tristram’s narration.
Themes
Chapter 3. Tristram explains how he learned of the story of his conception, which was told to him by his uncle Toby, who had listened to Tristram’s father’s complaints. Tristram’s father shared Tristram’s concerns that his ill-fated conception would produce an abnormal child, a fear that Tristram’s mother didn’t share.
By revealing the origin of the story he is telling, Tristram suddenly casts doubt on its veracity; the reader is prompted to consider how Tristram can narrate his life story beginning before he was even born. This chapter also introduces the character of Tristram’s uncle Toby.
Themes
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Chapter 4. Tristram criticizes readers who demand full access to a book and are unable to enjoy themselves without being let in on its secrets. He justifies the detail with which he has recounted the story of his conception as a gesture to these readers. Referencing Horace and Montaigne, Tristram pledges to continue narrating his life precisely. He then suggests that incurious readers skip the rest of the chapter. Tristram dates his conception to the first Sunday night or Monday morning of March 1718. He is able to place his conception so exactly because Tristram’s father, a former merchant living in retirement on their country estate, had a regular habit of winding up the clock on the first Sunday night of every month. The month of Tristram’s birth can be confirmed by his father’s illness earlier in the year and travels later in the spring.
Tristram continues to emphasize the tension between truth and fiction in his story. Teasing the reader, he elaborately “proves” his version of events despite knowing full well that the reader has no other choice but to believe his narration. The quasi-scientific method Tristram uses to date his conception is layered with irony, as his philosophical references emphasize. As Tristram argues with the reader about these details, he obliquely describes his parents’ character and social background, too.
Themes
Chapter 5. Tristram then dates his birth to November 5, 1718. He bemoans being born on Earth and wishes instead to have been born on another planet, though not one of the colder ones. Harshly criticizing earth and human life, Tristram explains that his life has been a series of misfortunes and accidents, if not any particularly great disasters.
Tristram continues to stress the melancholy nature of his birth, a sharp contrast to the typical memoir’s depiction of childhood as a happier, more innocent time. At the same time, Tristram undermines his own account by conceding that there is nothing particularly awful about his prosaically unfortunate life.
Themes
