Narrative of Narrative (Tristram Shandy)

Tristram Shandy presents an extreme in novelistic interpretation, since the presumed events of the narrative, of Tristram's autobiography and the Shandy family history, are not only told out of order, but are frequently cut off and fragmentary. At times, the suggestion of a word causes the narrative to jump from an event in 1718, say, to Toby's battle experience at Namur in 1695. The plot is peculiar in its appearance of non-linearity and disorder. Also, related to this, Tristram frequently interrupts the narrated events and reflexively calls attention to the question of narration itself. We will here propose that the attendant interpretive problems of this odd narrative are, for the most part, due to a confusion over the concept of plot. The tendency of much of the criticism is to take the events that the narrator says he is narrating unquestioningly as the plot of the novel. The narrator's statements about narrating (as journey, line, digression, etc.) and his recounting of what he is doing and when he is doing it are then seen as somehow above or beyond the plot, as if' these were outside the domain of the narrative proper. Even recent critically sophisticated readings -for instance, Hillis Miller's using Shandy as an exemplar of the deconstruction of linear plot, and Dennis Allen's attending to the linguistic play of the novel-seem to privilege the comments of the narrator, distancing them from the rest of the narrative, and almost taking them as if they were literal, as critical comments on narrative rather than as part of the narrative itself.'

Art · Literature · Narrative · Digital Humanities and Scholarship · Linguistics and Discourse Analysis · Narrative Theory and Analysis

• The anatomy of anatomia

  M Landers•2009

  Add to list