Hello, my name is Finn, and I'm going to help you understand this book.
Here it is, explained like you are 10:
Tristram Shandy promises to tell you his whole life story, starting before he was born, and then he keeps wandering off into funny stories about his father, his Uncle Toby, and the family servant Trim. He is still trying to get himself born chapters later, and somehow that is the joke and the joy of it. Sterne writes like a friend who cannot stop talking, and you will not want him to.
Laurence Sterne was a country clergyman in Yorkshire who wrote, as his dedication to Mr. Pitt says, in a retired thatched house, fencing against ill health by mirth. He believed every laugh adds something to this fragment of life. The first volumes of Tristram Shandy appeared in 1759, made him famous in London almost overnight, and he kept adding volumes until 1767.
Tristram sets out to tell his life and opinions from the very start, and the very start is the problem. In the first chapter his mother interrupts his father, at the worst possible moment, by asking whether he has wound up the clock, and Tristram blames that scattered moment for much of his later misfortune. Around this beginning gather his father Walter, a man of grand theories, his gentle Uncle Toby, a soldier wounded at a siege and forever refighting it on a bowling green with Corporal Trim, and the parson Yorick.
Expect digressions, blank and black pages, jokes about noses and names, and sentences that wander off like guests at a party. That wandering is the point. Sterne is playing with how minds work, and the play is still fresh, and still funny.
Laurence Sterne, a Yorkshire clergyman with a gift for mischief, published the first volumes of Tristram Shandy in 1759 and went on adding volumes until 1767. His hero promises to tell his life from the very beginning and can hardly get himself born: his father Walter's theories, his Uncle Toby's sieges, Corporal Trim, and a hundred digressions keep delightfully delaying him. Digression, Sterne admits, is the whole art.
The book opens with a dedication to the Right Honourable Mr. Pitt, in which Sterne, writing from a retired thatched house in a bye corner of the kingdom, begs him to take the book into the country and hopes it may beguile him of one moment's pain. The dedication itself is offered for sale in a later chapter, one of many signs that nothing in this book, not even its furniture, behaves as furniture should.
Chapter One begins at Tristram's conception, with his mother's famous question about the clock, and Chapter Two is already a learned defense of the homunculus, complete with authorities. From there the volumes proceed by association rather than chronology: Walter Shandy's hypotheses about names, noses, and Christian names, Uncle Toby's wound at Namur and his fortifications on the bowling green, Corporal Trim's readings, Dr. Slop and the christening, Yorick, Le Fever, and the Widow Wadman.
The nine volumes appeared from 1759 to 1767, and Sterne never finishes the life he promised, which is the joke and the design. Read it in small doses, with the digressions welcomed rather than endured, as Sterne's first delighted readers did.
Edition: Text: Project Gutenberg ebook 1079.
The first chapter
I WISH either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly consider’d how much depended upon what they were then doing;--that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;--and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost;--Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,--I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that in which the reader is likely to see me.--Believe me, good folks, this is not so inconsiderable a thing as many of you may think it;--you have all, I dare say, heard of the animal spirits, as how they are transfused from father to son, &c. &c.--and a great deal to that purpose:--Well, you may take my word, that nine parts in ten of a man’s sense or his nonsense, his successes and miscarriages in this world depend upon their motions and activity, and the different tracks and trains you put them into, so that when they are once set a-going, whether right or wrong, ’tis not a half-penny matter,--away they go cluttering like hey-go mad; and by treading the same steps over and over again, they presently make a road of it, as plain and as smooth as a garden-walk, which, when they are once used to, the Devil himself sometimes shall not be able to drive them off it.
Pray my Dear, quoth my mother, have you not forgot to wind up the clock?--Good G--!_ cried my father, making an exclamation, but taking care to moderate his voice at the same time,----Did ever woman, since the creation of the world, interrupt a man with such a silly question?_ Pray, what was your father saying?--------Nothing.
Source: Project Gutenberg. Published 1759-1767. Author died 1768. Public domain worldwide. Share this book: WhatsApp
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