The Visual Devices In Laurence Sterne's “Tristram Shandy“

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The visual devices in Laurence Sterne’s “Tristram Shandy”

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman is the major work of Irish-born novelist Laurence Sterne. Sterne wrote Tristram Shandy between 1759 and 1767. The book was published in five separate installments, each containing two volumes except the last, which included only the final volume 9. Tristram Shandy was enthusiastically received from the beginning, although it was also criticized for being vulgar and indecent in its frank treatment of sexual themes.
For its time, the novel is highly unconventional in its narrative technique. The title itself is a play on a novelistic formula that would have been familiar to Sterne's contemporary readers; instead of giving us the “life and adventures” of his hero, Sterne promises us his “life and opinions” which results in a radically new kind of narrative. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman was among the first novels to make the actual materiality of the book obvious by experimenting with narrative style. The text is supposed, as the title indicates, to set out the autobiography of Tristram Shandy; however, the birth of the hero, which the author sets about to discuss on the first page, does not finally occur until the end of the third book. What the story is about, however, is of secondary importance to how it is told. Sterne invites the reader to join him in the writing of the text by making the processes involved in composition apparent, thereby drawing attention to the visual qualities of the text. He employs a number of techniques to call attention to the book as a material object and undermines the apparent “naturalness” of its artificial conversational tone.
Perhaps the most striking of those techniques is Sterne’s use of unusual typographical devices that challenge the readers’ instinctive inclination to read the book as pure narrative. That the visual is important in Tristram ...