Truth, Fiction, and Storytelling
Throughout Tristram Shandy, Sterne foregrounds the tension between truth and fiction. This dynamic, the novel seems to suggest, is a perennial problem for all narratives, regardless of their form or content. It is also, paradoxically, what makes a narrative so compelling. Sterne weaves the tension between truth and fiction in storytelling into the genetic code of his novel, as the narrator Tristram is at once an alter ego of Sterne’s and a distinct character…
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Language and Comprehension
As a reflexive and highly self-conscious experiment in storytelling, Tristram Shandy centers the problem the listener poses to storyteller (or the reader to the author): will they be able to follow along with the plot, and will they understand its philosophical arguments, explorations, and ideas? The unreliable, meandering narrative style of the novel’s narrator and protagonist Tristram, conveys the difficulty of this problem, illustrating how the very means by which we tell and comprehend…
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Travel, Space, and Time
The multilayered narrative structure of Tristram Shandy emphasizes literature’s ability to transport the reader across time and space, even as it casts doubt of the truthfulness of such travels. The novel suggests that this narrative form of “travel” is in a sense no more unreal than physical travel itself. Put differently, literature can describe travel—and lived reality in general—in ways that ring truer to life than any objective, straightforward narrative. Through its use of creative…
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Sexuality and Propriety
Bawdy humor and inappropriate behavior appear throughout Tristram Shandy, questioning the validity of social norms which prohibit or discourage sexual innuendo and suggesting that such comedy is not only a fact of life, but also a source of delight. Working dirty jokes into the narrative, Sterne allows argues that the distinction between high culture and low culture is a false one and sets out to prove that he can turn the most cultured of…
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Science, Technology, and the Enlightenment
Much of Tristram Shandy centers on the “campaigns” of Tristram’s uncle Toby and his manservant Trim, who relive their military glory days by building model fortifications on Toby’s bowling green and conducting simulacra sieges. In depicting Toby’s hobby-horse, Sterne illustrates the changing nature of science in the early modern era, and the ideas of knowledge, rationality, and human development that guided those changes. Toby’s interest in war, as he passionately argues to…
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