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
Chapter 8. Tristram bemoans the fact that his thoughts and desires move much faster than he is capable of. This makes him resentful of his carriage, and he comments that French post-chaises are particularly unreliable. As soon as they depart, something always breaks, forcing the postilion to stop and fiddle with it. His postilion, Tristram notes, at least has an excellent set of teeth.
Tristram’s complaints about the gap between the possibilities of mental and physical travel mirror his novel itself, which allows the author—and the reader—to cover infinite space and time. His comments on French post-chaises (a type of carriage) reflect English stereotypes of France as a dysfunctional country where people live and eat well but do not tend to the needs of society at large.
Themes
Chapter 9. Tristram sarcastically comments that no town in France looks as good on a map as Montreuil—in person it is far less impressive. He is charmed, however, by the innkeeper’s daughter, Janatone. Tristram breaks off his description of Janatone, presuming his readers would prefer him to describe the local church or abbey.
Tristram continues to subvert the tropes of travelogue as he prefers the map to the view before him and as he puts an innkeeper’s daughter above churches or other beautiful buildings.
Themes
Chapter 10. Tristram, realizing Death might be close behind him, passes through Abbeville, but he is unable to see any of the local weaving industry as the workers have all gone to bed.
Tristram again pokes fun at the laziness of the French, who do not ever seem to be at work, even in their centers of industry.
Themes
Chapter 11. Tristram praises traveling. Though he warns that travel does “heat[] one,” he explains that he has a cure for that in the next chapter.
Tristram’s opinions on travel are as idiosyncratic as any other of his beliefs, as he considers travel to be both vivifying and potentially unhealthy.
Themes
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Chapter 12. Tristram declares that could he stipulate the circumstances of his death, he would die in a comfortable inn, not at home. Tristram believes the care of his friends and family would aggravate him, whereas the businesslike last rites he would receive at an inn would be pleasant and calming. If the inn in Abbeville were the only inn in the world, however, he would still remove it from his list of places to die.
Tristram’s dream of dying in an inn among strangers is of course scandalous, as it undermines all the essential values of the English household: family, belonging, and morality. His dream is also an elaborate setup for a cheap shot at the inn in Abbeville, which he disliked enough to retract his claim about preferring to die in an inn.
Themes
Chapter 13. Tristram muses on the grand tour, often criticized for its relentless pace, but he retorts that he sees positive value in motion. To Tristram, life is motion, whereas stillness or slowness lead only to “death and the devil.” Tristram goes so far as to argue that one must be disturbed out of their body in order to truly think.
Tristram’s inventive argument in this chapter both draws from and exaggerates the Enlightenment’s kinetic theories of physics, which explained the world in terms of movement. Tristram’s conclusion that one must be disturbed to truly be original however, is likely further than most eighteenth-century physicists and philosophers would go.
Themes
Chapter 14. Tristram turns to the subject of souls, citing theories of the volume each soul occupies, measuring the soul’s volume in Dutch or Italian miles. These calculations imply that souls are deflating and growing smaller, which means that within half a century humans will have no souls at all. Tristram excitedly anticipates a tumultuous time of pagan celebration, but then he remembers that he will certainly not live to see it.
Borrowing heavily from Robert Burton, Tristram continues to play with scientific ideas, advancing the absurd proposal that souls be measured by volume (Dutch and Italian miles were different lengths than the English mile). Tristram’s blasphemous vision of a soulless, pagan era is intended to scandalize his readers.
Themes
