The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

by Laurence Sterne

And his style, like those of Montaigne, Bacon, Burton, and others, could be characterized as anti-Ciceronian, the style of the mind in process, rather than one that gives us the results of its thinking, as we find in Edward Gibbon, a characteristic writer of Sterne’s time.

Yet while Sterne anticipated many of the techniques of modern and postmodern writers in his book, he differs from twentieth-century practice in many ways. Tristram Shandy is not a stream-of-consciousness novel in which we eavesdrop on the protagonist’s thoughts, as in Joyce or Virginia Woolf, but a stream of self-consciousness, as we shall see.

Given Tristram’s characteristic style, it is hardly an accident that critics still remain in a state of uncertainty as to whether Tristram Shandy was finished or not.

It is also relevant that Northrop Frye’s characterization of the later eighteenth century as an “age of Sensibility” in which writers were interested in process, not product (in some ways, as we have seen, a return to earlier modes of writing), begins appropriately with the example of Sterne.

Sterne’s verbal fecundity finds room for neologisms, archaisms, puns, nonce words.

or that his brain was like damp tinder, and no spark could possibly take hold,——

Shall we for ever make new books, as apothecaries make new mixtures, by pouring only out of one vessel into another?

I wish I may but manage it right; said my uncle Toby—but I declare, corporal I had rather march up to the very edge of a trench—— —A woman is quite a different thing—said the corporal.

There is nothing so awkward, as courting a woman, an’ please your honour, whilst she is making sausages——So