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 1. Tristram, despite his promise, challenges even the greatest of cabbage planters to continue planting their cabbages in a straight line forever, without making any digressions. Tristram attributes his wavering commitment to straightforward storytelling to the festive atmosphere of southern France and compares the story of Toby’s amours to the romance between Diego and Julia, imploring Eugenius to help keep him focused.
Tristram’s use of “cabbage planters” has a lewd double-meaning in mind: “cabbage” was slang for female genitalia, and “planting” for sexual intercourse. Tristram’s choice to use cabbage planters as an example while returning to the motif of the straight line certainly gives the latter a phallic connotation, too. Tristram compares the temptations of storytelling to those of sex: both are sources of “unproductive” pleasure.
Themes
Chapter 2. Tristram compares love and cuckoldry to starting a book, a point he has wanted to make to the reader for a long time. The thing they share, he argues, is that his way of writing is the best, and he is confident other writers would be disheartened reading his work. This is because, as with love and cuckoldry, Tristram believes he receives thoughts from God meant for other men.
Cuckoldry is the act of making someone else into a cuckold, or a spouse with a cheating partner. Tristram’s comparison indicates that he views writing as a zero-sum game: his gain in readership is another writer’s loss, just as in cuckoldry have sex with someone else’s spouse is pleasure gained by deceiving and humiliating the cuckold.
Themes
Chapter 3. Tristram issues greetings to several ill relatives, asking them about their health and various diseases. He is shocked by all the various medicines they require, swearing on his great aunt Dinah’s black velvet mask. Dinah wore down the mask’s chin from frequent use, and no one in the Shandy family has worn it since, as the mask is no longer functional but not worth repairing. This predilection to take things the extremes, Tristram argues, is the source of the Shandy family’s many successful members, including an archbishop, a judge, and several alchemists.
Tristram is spectacularly failing at sticking to the story of Toby’s amours—likely deliberately. His increasingly abstract and borderline nonsensical digressions underscore this disjunction, but they are not irrelevant to Toby’s amours. Rather than following the straight line of plot, Tristram is following the themes and motifs of love and sexuality in the Shandy family (the reader should recall Walter’s description of love as a disease).
Themes
Chapter 4. Tristram returns to his comparison of love and cuckoldry, claiming that in these cases the injured party is usually the third if not the last person to learn about the infidelity. Tristram attributes this problem to the subtleties of language, a problem that Toby is uniquely ill-equipped to solve. Indeed Toby’s amours would never have begun if he had not been informed by Susannah, who was herself informed by Bridget.
Tristram riffs on a popular idiom that the cuckold is the last person to learn of the harm that has been done to them. His comparison of cuckoldry to love is, of course, a Shandean twist on conventional wisdom. Toby, Tristram argues, was the last to learn of his own amours, which does not hint at their success.
Themes
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Chapter 5. Tristram asks rhetorically why all types of men always seem to have women pining for them. He suggests that physiology has answered that question. The same is true of water-drinkers, who arouse curiosity in women with their lifestyle choice—and this curiosity inevitably leads to desire. Yorick and Eugenius each advise the other to drink more water, which Tristram claims shows they have both carefully read Longinus. Tristram, on the other hand, will never read any book but his own.
Tristram again flips conventional wisdom on its head, arguing that women are attracted to sober men due to the mysteriousness of sobriety, an observation which seems to have little basis in reality. Tristram then refers to Cassius Longinus, an ancient Greek philosopher. His assertion that he does not read other books is obviously sarcastic if he is able to recognize the influence of third-century philosophers.
Themes
