The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

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The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (or, more briefly, Tristram Shandy) is a novel by Laurence Sterne. It was published in nine volumes, the first two appearing in 1760, and seven others following over the next ten years. It was not always highly thought of by other writers (Samuel Johnson responded that, "Nothing odd will do long"[1]), but its bawdy humour was popular with London society.

Sterne's text is filled with allusions and references to the leading thinkers and writers of the 17th and 18th centuries. Pope, Locke, and Swift were all major influences on Sterne and Tristram Shandy. It's easy to see that the satires of Pope and Swift formed much of the humour of Tristram Shandy, but Swift's sermons and Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding contributed ideas and frameworks that Sterne explored throughout his novel. Sterne's engagement with the science and philosophy of his day was extensive, however, and the sections on obstetrics and fortifications, for instance, indicate that he had a grasp of the main issues then current in those fields.

Four influences on Tristram Shandy overshadow all others: Rabelais, Cervantes, Montaigne's Essays and John Locke. Sterne had written an earlier piece called A Rabelaisian Fragment, which indicates his familiarity with the work of the French monk. But the earlier work is not needed to see the influence of Rabelais on Tristram Shandy, which is evident in multiple allusions, as well as in the overall tone of bawdy humor centered on the body. The first scene in Tristram Shandy, where Tristram's mother interrupts his father during the sex that leads to Tristram's conception, testifies to Sterne's debt to Rabelais.

The shade of Cervantes is similarly present throughout Sterne's novel. The frequent references to Rosinante, the character of Uncle Toby (who resembles Don Quixote in many ways) and Sterne's own description of his characters' 'Cervantic humour', along with the genre-defying structure of Tristram Shandy, which owes much to the second part of Cervantes' novel, all demonstrate the influence of Cervantes.

The novel also makes brilliant use of John Locke's theories of empiricism, or the way we assemble what we know of ourselves and our world from the "association of ideas" that come to us from our five senses. Sterne is by turns respectful and satirical of Locke's theories, using the association of ideas to construct characters' "hobby-horses," or whimsical obsessions, that both order and disorder their lives in different ways. It also owes a significant intertextual debt to Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, Swift's Battle of the Books, and Scriblerian collaborative work, The Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus.

The novel, as it stands, is seen by some as an elaborate and ingeniously-executed pun. Today, the novel is seen as a forerunner of later stream of consciousness, self-reflexive and postmodern writing. It also had a significant influence on Pushkin's composition of Eugene Onegin.

The Skull and Bones secret society is rumoured [2] to use characters from Tristram Shandy in its rituals.

The novel has been cited by John Updike as the one novel he wants to read before he dies.

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