Tristram Shandy Character Analysis

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (hereafter shortened to Tristram Shandy) is a unique novel written by British author Laurence Sterne in the eighteenth century. It is the first experimental novel which presents a wholly new notion of creative writing, and enjoys considerable reputation in literary history with its unique structure, its time-shifting, and its self-conscious narrator. The book is divided into nine volumes reaching over 600 pages. The novel mainly describes the psychic world and psychological procedure of its protagonist----Tristram Shandy. The plot narrated by the protagonist is quite insipid, without dramatic changes. In spite of the title, the book gives the reader very little of Tristram’s life, still less

In fact, association is the only coherent point to bind the event sequences of the story together with many irrelevant materials, many digressions. Sterne emphasizes the disjoint character of his novels by including sections he labels as fragments. Tristram shandy has “more the air of a collection of fragments, than of regular work.” Indeed, the novel holds a large collection of “frusts and crusts and rusts of antiquity”. The fragments contained in the novel are the miniature of the whole

Despite the continuing controversy about whether Tristram Shandy is ever completed, the novel presents an apparently irrelevant opening and conclusion which actually uncover a profound revelation beneath. Tristram Shandy breaks the tradition of beginning at the very beginning, that is, narration starts with the birth of the protagonist and carries on as he grows up. The author opens his screen at the scene of the conception of the hero with a rather comic and facetious tone. And the novel ends with a remark about a cock-and-bull story. The disrupt ending (if it can be called an ending) of this work leaves us an impression of incompleteness, which has roused a big wave of arguments as whether this book is cut short by the sudden death of the author, or the author’s willful design. In spite of the surface irrelevance, the author connects the birth of Tristram at the beginning and of Obadiah’s calf and the Shandy bull in the end, suggesting the similiarity between them; thus the novel’s major themes: impotency, time, and frustration are revealed. The character Tristram has been reduced in importance to the calf; the Shandean impotency has been extended to the family’s beasts; the novel is viewed as a cock-and-bull story, the best ever told. The opening and conclusion of the book exhibit the cyclical and comic character of life itself. Although the tradition of closure of the plot is not realized,