Reading Order
Tristram ShandyTristram Shandy Reading Order
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759-67) by Laurence Sterne is the most radical formal experiment in the eighteenth-century novel — a book that announces from its first sentence that it intends to violate every convention of narrative fiction and then proceeds to do so with brilliant consistency over nine volumes. Tristram, the narrator, intends to write his autobiography but is constitutionally incapable of getting started: he cannot begin his own life without first explaining everything that preceded it, and his story keeps getting interrupted by digressions, anecdotes, the opinions of his father Walter and Uncle Toby, and his own meta-commentary on the difficulty of writing. By Volume Three, Tristram has barely reached his own birth; by Volume Six, he is a young child; and the book ends (after volumes of digression, including a complete novel-within-the-novel about Uncle Toby's courtship of the Widow Wadman) before Tristram has reached adolescence. Sterne uses this radical approach to investigate the relationship between time, memory, narrative, and the self — and in doing so anticipates modernist fiction by a century and a half. Tristram Shandy is the direct ancestor of Ulysses, Mrs. Dalloway, and In Search of Lost Time.
Where to start
Tristram Shandy (1759-67) — the complete nine volumes. Best Sterne reading order: Tristram Shandy → A Sentimental Journey. The Florida edition (University Press of Florida) is the definitive scholarly edition; the Penguin Classics edition is excellent for general readers.
Complete Tristram Shandy Book List
- 1Buy
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
Laurence Sterne·1759·The complete nine volumes — Tristram, Walter Shandy, Uncle Toby, and the Widow Wadman. The Penguin Classics edition edited by Melvyn New and Joan New is the standard edition; the illustrations Sterne commissioned for the original are part of the text - 2Buy
A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy
Laurence Sterne·1768·The companion — Yorick's sentimental journey. The companion as the other half of Sterne's work: where Tristram Shandy is the radical investigation of the impossibility of narrative, A Sentimental Journey is the investigation of the moral value of sympathy and sentiment - 3Buy
Don Quixote
Miguel de Cervantes·1605·Cervantes's companion — the original metafictional novel. The companion as the predecessor: both Tristram Shandy and Don Quixote are organized around the relationship between the book and the reader's awareness of reading a book, and both use digressions, interpolated tales, and self-referential commentary to investigate the nature of narrative itself - 4Buy
In Search of Lost Time
Marcel Proust·1913·Proust's companion investigation of the relationship between time, memory, and narrative. The companion as the most direct modernist descendant: Proust's vast investigation of involuntary memory and the impossibility of capturing experience in narrative is the twentieth-century version of what Sterne was doing in the eighteenth - 5Buy
The Pale King
David Foster Wallace·2011·Wallace's companion posthumous novel — about boredom, attention, and the IRS. The companion as the postmodern descendant of the same formal radicalism: Wallace's investigation of what narrative can and cannot contain is the twenty-first-century version of Sterne's eighteenth-century experiment - 6Buy
Jacques the Fatalist
Denis Diderot·1796·Diderot's companion philosophical novel about Jacques and his master on the road. The companion as the French version of the same Shandean investigation: Diderot explicitly responds to Tristram Shandy (and to Don Quixote), and Jacques the Fatalist uses the same techniques of digression, meta-commentary, and narrative self-interruption to investigate the relationship between fate and free will - 7Buy
Mrs. Dalloway
Virginia Woolf·1925·Woolf's companion investigation of the same questions — time, consciousness, and the relationship between the self and its past. The companion as the modernist descendant: Woolf's stream of consciousness technique is the twentieth-century version of the Shandean investigation of the relationship between the mind and the narrative it tries to impose on experience - 8Buy
If on a winter's night a traveler
Italo Calvino·1979·Calvino's companion metafiction — the novel about reading a novel. The companion as the postmodern Italian descendant of the same formal investigation: Calvino's direct address to the reader ('You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel...') is the postmodern equivalent of Sterne's constant meta-commentary on the difficulty of his own enterprise
Tristram Shandy — Frequently Asked Questions
What is Tristram Shandy about?
Tristram Shandy is about the difficulty of writing an autobiography — and by extension about the difficulty of capturing any experience in narrative. Tristram, the narrator, begins with the intention of writing the story of his own life, but is constitutionally unable to begin: his story keeps requiring that he first explain everything that preceded it, and every explanation generates new digressions, new anecdotes, new opinions from his father Walter (a philosopher obsessed with theories about names, noses, and education) and Uncle Toby (a retired soldier who re-fights the Siege of Namur in his garden), and new meta-commentary on the impossibility of the enterprise itself. By the time Sterne finished the ninth volume (published over eight years), Tristram had reached only his childhood. The book is simultaneously one of the funniest novels ever written, one of the most formally radical, and one of the most sustained investigations of the relationship between time, consciousness, and narrative.
Is Tristram Shandy the first modern novel?
Tristram Shandy has a strong claim to be the most formally modern of the eighteenth-century novels. It was published between 1759 and 1767 — long before modernism as a movement — but its formal characteristics anticipate the techniques that Joyce, Woolf, and Proust would develop in the early twentieth century: stream of consciousness, metafictional self-commentary, the investigation of the relationship between time and narrative, the use of the narrator's consciousness as the organizing principle of the text. E.M. Forster famously said that all novelists are born knowing Tristram Shandy whether or not they have read it; and scholars have traced Sterne's influence on Diderot (who explicitly responded to him in Jacques the Fatalist), Goethe, Heine, and through them on the whole tradition of the self-conscious novel. Whether it is 'the first modern novel' depends on what one means by modern, but it is certainly the most radical formal experiment in the eighteenth century and one of the most radical in the history of the novel.
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