Disorderly narrative

Tristram Shandy incites critical confusion. The plot, refusing to yield a simple, readily describable storyline, is troublesome: the presumed events of the narrative – of Tristram's autobiography and the Shandy family history – are not only told out of order, but are frequently cut off and fragmentary. At times, the suggestion of a word causes the narrative to jump from an event in 1718, say, to Toby's battle experience at Namur in 1695. And then it might turn to a disquisition on trenches, or on names, or on breeches. Further, Tristram frequently interrupts the narrated events and reflexively calls attention to the question of narration itself, seemingly going beyond the pale of a normal or straight narrative. Overall, on the surface of it, the novel appears to be manifestly nonlinear, knotted, disorderly, convoluted, and fragmented, almost to the point of disintegration, as a number of critics have noted. To spin off a classic metaphor for narrative as a road or journey, Tristram Shandy loops around and goes almost nowhere, making short detours and false starts, through thickets, only to return to pretty much the same place.

Despite this manifest confusion, my thesis here is that Tristram Shandy, at least on one significant level, comprises a relatively simple historical novel that explicitly features the act of Tristram's writing.