The life and opinions of Tristram Shandy, gentleman

About the book

Tristram Shandy undertakes an account of his life but repeatedly finds himself drawn backwards, sideways, or into an argument about how the account should be written. His father Walter's theories and his uncle Toby's military preoccupations give the household distinctive ways of misunderstanding events. Conversations, accidents, learned digressions, and interruptions continually delay the progress that a conventional biography would promise. Sterne makes this delay the source of both comedy and intimacy, allowing apparently secondary people and incidents to become central. The narrator's direct dealings with the reader turn the act of composition into part of the story. Beneath the play with sequence and explanation lies an affectionate attention to vulnerability, suggesting that a person's life may be understood through the habits and attachments that orderly narration would be tempted to leave out.

• Narrative and digression
• Habit and perception
• Human vulnerability

Why read it

For an inventive narrator whose difficulties in telling a life become a comic and surprisingly tender account of living among other people.

Novel · English text