The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
Tim Parnell 鈥� Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759-67)
The 91影视破解版 Prize launched in the tercentenary year of Sterne鈥檚 birth and the exuberantly inventive author of Tristram Shandy is one of its tutelary spirits. Written before the novel came to be narrowly associated with verisimilitude and linear anecdote, Tristram Shandy鈥檚 restlessness with conventions points to the genre鈥檚 near-limitless possibilities. Tristram鈥檚 life and opinions stand in ironic contrast to the life-and-adventures formula of much mid-eighteenth-century fiction, but like the best anti-novels Sterne鈥檚 book is about much more than the debunking of literary clich茅s. For all their comedy, the 鈥榩itiful misadventures鈥� of the novel鈥檚 鈥榮mall HERO鈥� have an integrity and pathos of their own and Tristram鈥檚 inability to tell the story of his life without making 鈥榝ifty deviations from a straight line鈥� is informed as much by a worldview as an unorthodox poetic of fiction. Just as the complexity of things is shown to be ill-explained by the systematic thinking beloved of Tristram鈥檚 father, Walter, so, the very structure of Tristram Shandy implies, linear, chronological narrative can鈥檛 do justice to what Sterne calls the 鈥榬iddles and mysteries鈥� of existence. Hence Tristram Shandy鈥檚 open, digressive form offers both an alternative to the inevitable reductions of plot and a foil to the tyranny of the will to system.