Tristram Shandy

Treatment of the Reader in Tristram Shandy

The novel Tristram Shandy by Lawrence Sterne not only caused a sensation among the reading public , but also elicited many a surprised comment from amongst the eminent litterateurs of the time . Particularly apt is the following remark made by playwright and novelist Oliver Goldsmith In one page the author makes the readers a low bow ' he says , and in the next pulls them by the nose he must talk in riddles , and then send them to bed to dream of the solution (qtd . in Thackeray 384

. He is making the charge that the reader is severely manipulated and maltreated . In normal circumstances such would be considered poor literature , but not so Tristram Shandy . This essay explores the purpose of Sterne in his literary innovations , and argues that , even if there be substance to Goldsmith 's accusation , the novel is nevertheless highly significant and successful in its endeavor

Sterne is deliberately playing with the expectations of his reader , and his purpose is to undermine the rational mindset . He was writing immediately after the Augustan Age in literature . The literature in this period was characterized by Neo-Classicism , practiced and preached most notably by Dryden and Pope . Dryden was a member of the Royal Society of London , a body established to encourage experimental science and to propagate the valued inherent in it - reason , common sense , proportion balance , and so on . The old based on the Church was dissolving and and artists sought a new standard in nature and its laws The of the Augustan Age felt that the culture of ancient Greece and Rome embodied the same values , and therefore sought to establish a new classicism . The movement eventually bred its antithesis in Romanticism , which decried the dictates of reason , in favor of feeling and spontaneity . In a sense Sterne can be described as an early Romantic , even though his writing has nothing in common with the literature that came to be recognized as Romantic . The protest of Sterne is in fact far more advanced that that of the Romantics , and too far advanced for his contemporaries to recognize properly . Critics of the modern age have recognized in Sterne a forerunner of post-modernism Tristram Shandy is now seen as an early model of the stream of consciousness ' technique , practiced by James Joyce and Virginia Woolf

At the heart of the novel is the philosophy of John Locke , and there are many references throughout the novel to the ideas found in Locke 's seminal treatise of philosophy An Essay on Human Understanding (1690 We recall that Locke deconstructed the strict rationalism forwarded by the Cartesians and the purveyors of experimental science . Descartes had proposed a mind and matter dualism , the upshot of which is that the mind comes to absolute knowledge of matter . But Locke contended that there is no knowledge beyond the mind and what it gathers through the five senses . This is the central tenet of Locke 's empiricism , and is also...