Consuming Time: Narrative and Disease in Tristram Shandy

Abstract One would think that the subject of time and Sterne, especially in Tristram Shandy, had been entirely exhausted, like Yorick’s broken-winded horse. The second quotation in my epigraph is only too well known to anyone having the least acquaintance with Sterne’s writing, dramatizing what has traditionally been conceived as the futile effort of the Modern to write to the moment, and enacting the ultimate victory of time over the writer and therefore over the narrative. Sterne criticism has identified various types of time at play in Tristram Shandy, the most notable being the psychological Lockean time of the individual who associates randomly within his own mind and, relatedly, the temporal structure of the entire narrative as it emanates from Tristram’s erratic consciousness. Some attention has even been paid to Sterne’s own physical-personal time and its relation to the periodic publication of the novel in two-volume installments.