Tristram shandy essay

Tristram Shandy was a natural touchstone for James Joyce as he explained his attempts “to build many planes of narrative with a single aesthetic purpose” in “Finnegans Wake (1939)”, and Virginia Woolf found in “A Sentimental Journey” an experimental prototype of stream-of-consciousness narration.

Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, the nine volume book which conquered London’s literary bazaar throughout the years of its publication from 1759 to 1767, has served over the way of its response as a working example for reading literature and idea side by side.

Walter Shandy, Tristram’s unfortunate father and the book’s most eager mouthpiece for the Lockean system, is frequently shown quoting almost directly from Locke’s Essay, professing earnestly on the way in which “in every sound man’s head, there is a regular succession of ideas, which follow each other” (Traugott, 1954, p. 225).

For Traugott, Tristram Shandy’s relation to the Essay Concerning Human Understanding was above all adversarial, a heady miss of witty subversion and metaphysical interrogation that pushes Locke’s Sceptical method to the point of collapsing his system.