ALBU ROXANA MADALINA

ANUL 2 ROMANA- ENGLEZA

GRUPA1

THE LIFE AND OPINIONS OF TRISTRAM SHANDY, GENTLEMAN

BY LAURENCE STERNE

The first volume of ,, The life and opinions of Tristram Shandy,

Gentleman by Laurence Sterne begins with the conception of Tristram
Shandy. He begins in first volume chapter 1 to talk about his parents, about
how he percept them since he was unbourn.
At the very moment of procreation, his mother asked his father if he
has remembered to wind the clock. The distraction and annoyance led to the
distruption of the proper balance of humors necessary to conceive a well
favored child. This text is filled with allusions and references to the leading
thinkers and writers of the 17 th and 18 th centuries.
In first volume Tristram criticizes his mother’s ill timed question and
wonders the effect it had on his father’s performance. Tristram credits his
uncle Toby for the anecdote, whereon Tristram quotes a conversation
between Toby and his father that claims Tristram’s problems started nine
months before he ever came into the world. The constructional devices
(chaotic narrative order, prominent self-conscious authorial commentary,
transposition of material, temporal displacements, the inclusion of secondary
anecdotes, digressions of all kinds) are laid bare and not motivated by the
events or situations in the story. The narrator, Tristram Shandy is moving
away from the facts of the subject of which he is writing and stating his own
opinions. Tristram talks about how he does not care and how he is going to
give his opinions and say what he likes. In its approach to narrative and its
willingness to use such graphic elements as an all black page and a page of
marbled end paper within the text. Tristam Shandy admits from the
beginning that his narration will be unconventional, and he tell the story in
his own way.
 The narrator frequently breaks into imaginary dialogues with the
reader. Although Tristram lays down basic rules for conversation, he offers a
variety of reported conversations in which all guidelines are shattered.
In volume 1 chapter 2 the narrator says that the ,,homunculus
has the same loco motive powers and faculties with humans.’’ In this chapter
I think he wants to explain that even he was unbourn he has memories. In
this volume the narrator is unbourn and he speaks about his conception and
about his memories.
In chapter 3 he tells about a conversation between his father and
his uncle Toby, that claims Tristram problem’s started since he was
procreated. He tells also about his father that he was an excellent natural
philosopher. All the things that the father figure wants and desires are
contradicted, they do not come true. The father is time. But there is another
kind of time; that of fantasy and this is a very long, almost eternal time.
Tristram's story begins ab Ovo ("from the egg"), in defiance of the
Homeric epic tradition that begins stories in the middle of things and
then allows the background to unfold along with the action. The
alternative, seemingly, would be to begin with the beginning; Tristram
takes this possibility to an almost ludicrous extreme by
beginning before the beginning, from his conception rather than his
birth. This strategy leads him into the problem of relating events of
which he could have no knowledge, which would call into question his
status as an autobiographical narrator. He anticipates and answers
this concern by explaining that he has learned the story of his
conception from his Uncle Toby, who in turn heard it from Walter
Shandy. The effect is to emphasize that Tristram's accounts are not
fictional--but neither should we take them as perfectly objective.
Tristram represents a type of authorial presence different from that of
Sterne himself: he is not free to invent characters or imagine events,
but rather filters a "real" world (and a drastically limited and personal
one, with a radius of but five miles) through his own experience,
memory, personality, and opinions.