Laurence Sterne (1713 – 1768) was an Irish-born English novelist and an Anglican clergyman. He is best known for his novels The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, and A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy.
For the GRE Literature, focus on Tristram Sha andy. It is very very likely to appear on the test.
Notable for its bawdy humor and inventive narrative devices, Tristram Shandy is ostensibly Tristram’s narration of his life story. But it is one of the central jokes of the novel that he cannot explain anything without endless diversions, and so we do not even reach Tristram’s own birth until Volume III.
Tristram Shandy – GRE flash card
notable characteristics: bawdy humor, dense satire, unconventional narrative devices
primary characters:
Walter – Tristram’s father
Uncle Toby – his uncle
Trim – Toby’s servant
Doctor Slop
Parson Yorick
allusions:
- Pope and Swift are frequently satirized.
- references to Cervantes, particularly Don Quixote are also present in the frequent references to Rosinante (the horse), the “quixotic” character of Uncle Toby and Sterne’s own description of his characters’ “Cervantic humor.”
-The novel also references 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 observation and our senses.
Click below to listen to chapters 1-3 of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy.
