The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

Tristram opens Volume 5 with a digression about plagiarism. He complains that by borrowing from others, authors merely fill one vessel with the contents of an older vessel, rather than making anything new. Ironically, Tristram’s complaint is borrowed from Robert Burton’s 1621 book Anatomy of Melancholy. His complaint about plagiarism is, in itself, plagiarized. Like so much of Tristram’s narrative, however, the act of plagiarism has meaning in itself. By plagiarizing a complaint about plagiarism, Sterne calls attention to the fact that all writing—and all ideas—are built on what has been written before. This point reflects Locke’s beliefs about ideas and association; he argues that the human mind forms ideas by taking in information and recombining it into new thoughts and ideas. Similarly, Tristram inherits many of his father’s qualities, but he is not a plagiarized personality. He may take on the character traits of the people he grew up with, rather than inventing an entirely original personality, but this is the nature of human existence. Through his ironic criticism of plagiarism, Tristram emphasizes the importance of understanding that all writing, like all people, is a product of its predecessors and context.

In another permutation of the theme of The Interplay of Life and Literature, Walter dedicates his life to writing the Tristra-paedia. The book is a detailed guide on the perfect way to raise a son, yet writing his book about raising a son distracts him from actually raising his son. Even worse, by the time the book is finished, Tristram will have grown up, making it a futile pursuit. In this way, the Tristra-paedia foreshadows the challenges Tristram faces in writing his autobiography. Tristram has already complained that his attempts to write a detailed explanation of his own life are taking so long that he will need to dedicate the rest of his life to the pursuit. There is no way to reduce the complexity of human existence into a single text, Tristram is beginning to realize, just as his father was forced to set aside the actual raising of his child so that he could study the best possible way in which to raise his child. When Tristram hints that he has also written chapters in the Trista-paedia, the reader recognizes that the novel Tristram Shandy is, in effect, a rewriting of the Tristra-paedia in which Tristram tries to complete his father’s work and understand how he became who is.

Tristram’s accidental circumcision and his father’s reaction to it are emblematic of both Shandy men’s struggles to finish their magnum opuses. Walter fears that Tristram’s accident has rendered him impotent—unable to reproduce and carry on the family legacy. Walter’s solution, the Trista-paedia, both prevents him from perpetuating his legacy by impeding his relationship with his son and itself remains incomplete. Tristram works to complete his father’s work and immortalize him in his own book, but as his father feared, he too seems unable to reach completion of his work.

By the end of Volume 6, Tristram becomes increasingly aware of the absurdity of his narrative experiment. He has so many chapters promised to the audience and so little time in which to write them that he may never be able to keep his promises. Nevertheless, he switches his focus to his Uncle Toby. The relationship between Toby and the Widow Wadman becomes the narrative focus of the novel, save for a brief excursion to Europe. This desire to switch focus suggests that Tristram is feeling overwhelmed by the telling of his own story. The pressure of trying to fit everything about a life into a single book is proving to be too much, and Tristram yearns for a simple, self-contained event that will allow him to keep his promises to the reader. Ironically, this event takes place before Tristram is even born. To finish the story of his life, Tristram is beginning to believe that he must go back to a time when he was not yet born.