Tristram Shandy and the Reader's Imagination

Abstract

In Tristram Shandy, Sterne forces us to recognize the limiting and distorting effects of the preconceptions which we may habitually impose upon new experience. This instructive confrontation with our own limits is accomplished by three central methods. Most frequently, we cannot resist judging situations that are under consideration by characters in the novel; then the processes that uncover their deluded prejudices lay bare ours as well. Through what amounts to a technique of parable, we are shown our own limitations as we discover those of Sterne's characters. Second, we are made to participate in the double meanings of words, with the effect that we recognize the tendency of our minds to make reductive assumptions on the basis of unreliable evidence. Finally, the narrator repeatedly manipulates us by deliberately disappointing expectations of narrative form developed through earlier reading. By arbitrarily departing from narrative convention, Sterne shows that arbitrariness lies in the conventions themselves and that our allegiance to them is a sign of a preference for convenient artifice over inconvenient reality. Such reevaluations of ourselves and our habitual responses persuade us of our need for the more complex perceptions of experience that Tristram Shandy demonstrates.