Laurence Sterne's 1759 English novel follows the eccentric narrator Tristram Shandy as he attempts to tell his life story, constantly digressing into philosophical musings, family anecdotes, and playful experiments with narrative form. This groundbreaking work of fiction defied 18th-century literary conventions with its stream-of-consciousness style and self-aware commentary on the act of storytelling itself.
I WISH either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly consider’d how much depended upon what they were then doing;—that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;—and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost;—Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,—I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that in which the reader is likely to see me.—Believe me, good folks, this is not so inconsiderable a thing as many of you may think it;—you have all, I dar…Continue reading →
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