The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy,

Gentleman
[edit] Synopsis and style
"The Jack-boots Transformed into Mortars": Trim has found an old pair of jack-boots useful
as mortars. Unfortunately, they turn out to have been Walter's great-grandfather's. (Book III,
Chapters XXII and XXIII)
As its title suggests, the book is ostensibly Tristram's narration of his life story. But it is one
of the central jokes of the novel that he cannot explain anything simply, that he must make
explanatory diversions to add context and colour to his tale, to the extent that we do not even
reach Tristram's own birth until Volume III.
Consequently, apart from Tristram as narrator, the most familiar and important characters in
the book are his father Walter, his mother, his Uncle Toby, Toby's servant Trim, and a
supporting cast of popular minor characters including the chambermaid, Susannah, Doctor
Slop and the parson, Yorick.
Most of the action is concerned with domestic upsets or misunderstandings, which find
humour in the opposing temperaments of Waltersplenetic, rational and somewhat
sarcasticand Uncle Toby, who is gentle, uncomplicated and a lover of his fellow man.
"The long-nosed Stranger of Strasburg": Book IV opens with a story from one of Walter's
favourite books, a collection of stories in Latin about noses.
In between such events, Tristram as narrator finds himself discoursing at length on sexual
practices, insults, the influence of one's name, noses, as well as explorations of obstetrics,
siege warfare and philosophy, as he struggles to marshal his material and finish the story of
his life.
Though Tristram is always present as narrator and commentator, the book contains
surprisingly little of his life, only the story of a trip through France and accounts of the four
comical mishaps which shaped the course of his life from an early age:
While still only a homunculus, Tristram's implantation within his mother's womb was
disturbed. At the very moment of procreation, his mother asked his father if he had
remembered to wind the clock. The distraction and annoyance led to the disruption of
the proper balance of humors necessary to conceive a well-favored child.
One of his father's pet theories was that a large and attractive nose was important to a
man making his way in life. In a difficult birth, Tristram's nose was crushed by Dr.
Slop's forceps.
A second theory of his father was that a person's name exerted enormous influence
over that person's nature and fortunes, with the worst possible name being Tristram. In
view of the previous accidents, Tristram's father decreed that the boy would receive an
especially auspicious name, Trismegistus. Susannah mangled the name in conveying it
to the curate, and the child was christened Tristram.
As a toddler, Tristram suffered an accidental circumcision, when Susannah let a
window sash fall as he urinated out of the window because his chamberpot was
missing.
[edit] Techniques and influences
[edit] Artistic incorporation and accusations of plagiarism
Sterne incorporated into Tristram Shandy many passages taken almost word for word from
Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy, Francis Bacon's Of Death, Rabelais and many
more, and rearranged them to serve the new meaning intended in Tristram Shandy.
[1]
Tristram
Shandy was highly praised for its originality, and nobody noticed until years after Sterne's
death. The first to note them was physician and poet John Ferriar, who did not see them
negatively, and commented:
[1][2]


If [the reader's] opinion of Sterne's learning and originality be lessened by the
perusal, he must, at least, admire the dexterity and the good taste with which he has
incorporated in his work so many passages, written with very different views by
their respective authors.

Critics of the 19th century, who were hostile to Sterne for other reasons, used Ferriar's
findings to defame Sterne, claim the he was artistically dishonest, and almost unanimously
accused him of mindless plagiarism.
[1]
Scholar Graham Petrie closely analyzed the alleged
passages in 1970; he observed that while more recent commentators now agree that Sterne
"rearranged what he took to make it more humorous, or more sentimental, or more
rhythmical", none of them "seems to have wondered whether Sterne had any further, more
purely artistic, purpose." Studying a passage in Volume V, chapter 3, Petrie observes: "such
passage ... reveals that Starne's copying was far more from purely mechanical, and that his
rearrangements go far beyond what would be necessary for merely stylistic ends."
[1]

[edit] Rabelais
A major influence on Tristram Shandy is Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel.
[3][1]
Rabelais
was by far Sterne's favourite author, and in his correspondence he made clear that he
considered himself as Rabelais' successor in humour writing, and instead distanced himself
from Jonathan Swift:
[4][5]

I ... deny I have gone as far as Swift: he keeps a due distance from Rabelais; I keep a due
distance from him.
One of its many passages that Sterne incorporated is the one about "the length and goodness
of the nose".
[6][7][8]
The first scene in Tristram Shandy, where Tristram's mother interrupts his
father during the sex that leads to Tristram's conception, testifies to Sterne's debt to Rabelais.
[citation needed]

Sterne had written an earlier piece called A Rabelaisian Fragment, which indicates his
familiarity with the work of the French Monk and practicing Doctor. But the earlier work is
not needed to see the influence of Rabelais on Tristram Shandy, which is evident by the
generally implausible story line and pervasive satirical, comedic portrayals of everyday life.
[edit] Ridiculing solemnity
Sterne was no friend of gravity, a quality which excited his disgust; Tristram Shandy gave a
ludicrious turn to solemn passages from respected authors that it incorporated, as well as to
the Consolatio Literary Genre.
[9][1]

One of the subjects of such ridicule were some of the opinions contained in Robert Burton's
The Anatomy of Melancholy, a book that mentioned sermons as the most respectable type of
writing, and that was favoured by the learned; Burton's attitude was to try to prove
indisputable facts by weighty quotations; his book consisted mostly of a collection of the
opinions of a multitude of writers, to which Burton often modestly refrained to add his own,
divided into quaint and old-fashioned categories; it discussed and determined everything from
the doctrines of religion to military discipline, from inland navigation to the morality of
dancing-schools.
[9]

Many of the singularity of Tristram Shandy character are drawn from Burton. Burton
introductory address to the reader, where he indulges himself in an Utopian sketch of a perfect
government, form the basis of Tristram Shandy's notions on the subject. Burton's quaint and
old fashioned categories inspired Sterne for many of his ludicrous chapters titles. And Sterne
parodies Burton's attitude by weighty quotation.
[9]
The first four chapters of Tristram Shandy
are also founded on some passages in Burton.
[9]

In Chapter 3, Volume 5, Sterne makes a parody of the Consolatio Literary Genre, mixing and
reworking passages from three "widely separated sections" of Burton's Anatomy, including a
parody of Burton's "grave and sober account" of Cicero's grief for the death of his daughter
Tullia.
[1]

[edit] Other techniques and influences
His text is filled with allusions and references to the leading thinkers and writers of the 17th
and 18th centuries.
[citation needed]
Pope, Locke, and Swift were all major influences on Sterne
and Tristram Shandy. Satires of Pope and Swift formed much of the humour of Tristram
Shandy, but Swift's sermons and Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding
contributed ideas and frameworks that Sterne explored throughout his novel. Other major
influences are Cervantes, Montaigne's Essays, and John Locke.
[citation needed]
It also owes a
significant inter-textual debt to Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy,
[1]
Swift's Battle of the
Books, and the Scriblerian collaborative work, The Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus.
[citation
needed]

"My Uncle Toby on his Hobby-horse": Toby's hobby-horse is the military, and in this scene,
he gets himself and Trim so excited by his discussion of military matters that they begin
acting them out. George Cruikshank's illustration of Book IV, Chapter XVIII.
The shade of Cervantes is similarly present throughout Sterne's novel. The frequent references
to Rocinante, the character of Uncle Toby (who resembles Don Quixote in many ways) and
Sterne's own description of his characters' "Cervantic humour", along with the genre-defying
structure of Tristram Shandy, which owes much to the second part of Cervantes' novel, all
demonstrate the influence of Cervantes.
[10]

The novel also makes use of John Locke's theories of empiricism, or the way we assemble
what we know of ourselves and our world from the "association of ideas" that come to us
from our five senses. Sterne is by turns respectful and satirical of Locke's theories, using the
association of ideas to construct characters' "hobby-horses", or whimsical obsessions, that
both order and disorder their lives in different ways.
Sterne's engagement with the science and philosophy of his day was extensive, however, and
the sections on obstetrics and fortifications, for instance, indicate that he had a grasp of the
main issues then current in those fields.
[citation needed]

Today, the novel is commonly seen as a forerunner of later novels' use of stream of
consciousness and self-reflexive writing. However, current critical opinion is divided on this
question.
[citation needed]
There is a significant body of critical opinion that argues that Tristram
Shandy is better understood as an example of an obsolescent literary tradition of "Learned
Wit", partly following the contribution of D.W. Jefferson.
[11][Need quotation on talk to verify]