LAURENCE STERNE
Laurence Sterne, the author of Tristram Shandy, was born in Ireland in
1713.He became famous when, at the age of 47, he published the first part of The
Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy,a strange novel which mirrors the
personality of its author. Sterne also wrote A Sentimental Journery Through
France and Italy. His writings differ from the main stream of narrative of his
time. He does not describe a series of characters connected with each other
and does not often follow a logical sequence. He shows more interest in the
analysis of human feelings and pays great attention to the minutest details. He
seems not to give importance to what he is writing and lets his thoughts wander
at large. But what makes Sterne great is the subtle humour, the irony and the
smile which emerge from his es. He gives the reader a picture of what man
can be when he is free from conventions and can give vent to his instincts,
sentiments and feelings.
All these elements of novelty give to his novel the character of
anti-novel. In particular the title which read Life and Opinions and not
Life and Adventures as the convention dictated. The novel in fact does not
deal with the adventures and events of Tristram Shandy's life but with his
mental life. And everything which is
narrated in the novel is distorted by Tristram's judgement and interpretation
in spite of the fact that almost all of them belong to a time when the
protagonist was not yet born. In other words the novel consists not only of a
subjective narration, as the presence of a first person narrator indicates, but
of the subjective narration of subjectively associated facts ideas and
feelings. Time has a multeplicity of levels: the chronologicol time of events,
the narrator's time and the reader's time. Another feature of the novel is the
overt presence of the narratee who is often implicated by the narrator with his
direct appeals such as "the reader","you" .Its syntax, its physical
organization, its graphological aspect are characterised by an extreme
eccentricity: the length of chapters varies from a few lines to several es;
the punctuation mostly consists of dashes; there are blank es, black es,
asterisks and even drawings.
