The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman is a comic novel by the English writer Laurence Sterne, published serially in nine volumes between 1759 and 1767. Presented as the narrator Tristram's own memoir, the book is famous for constantly digressing from its own subject: Tristram's birth does not actually occur until the third volume, and the surrounding chapters instead dwell on the domestic quarrels between his short-tempered father Walter and his gentle, hobby-horse-riding Uncle Toby, alongside comic discourses on obstetrics, philosophy, noses, and much else, framed by four calamities Tristram claims doomed him from the start. Sterne fills the book with unconventional devices for its time, including sexual innuendo and deliberately unfinished sentences, a solid black page marking a character's death, a marbled page, and inserted diagrams tracing the wandering shape of the plot itself. Though Victorian critics later condemned it as obscene for a clergyman to have written, the novel made Sterne a celebrated author in his own lifetime, and twentieth-century modernist and postmodernist writers, including James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, came to regard it as a forerunner of stream-of-consciousness narration and experimental storytelling.