The extract I am going to analyse is taken from Sterne's novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentlemen. The novel is an unconventional novel and it is difficult to summarize as a matter of fact it does not follow a chronological narration, the narration develops, goes on and goes back. Also author's interventions, digressions and comments are common. The story refers to a family, the father and the mother of the main character who is Tristram Shandy are some characters. The novel is made up by nine volumes and the chapter I am going to analyse is about Tristram's conception.

In the first part of the extract the narrator that is the novelist because he writes in first person, speaks about the readers. He says that there are different kinds of readers. Especially he refers to the readers that are no readers at all. The narrator invites the "not at all readers" not to read the novel if they are only interested to the storyline. He uses the expression Shut the door to invite them to close the book or to skip over the chapter. Reading the beginning of the chapter IV, the reader also understands that the narrator jokes with the reader making a comic effect as you can see at lines thirteen and fourteen. In addition the narrator makes references to other texts and authors like Montaigne and Horace, and referring to Horace's works he does not say the work's name because he knows that the readers could know without quoting it.

Now I am going to analyse the part which refers to Tristram's conception. Forgetting the plot how Sterne says, the reader can see in the text that the novelist wrote in a particular way. He creates curiosity in the reader to search on the calendar the real date of Tristram's conception not saying the date but only in the night, betwixt the first Sunday and the first Monday in the month of march. Later the intelligent reader can realize that the narrator keeps the reader attention and he entertains the reader (between line 26 and line 28). As before also in the following lines, the narrator uses advices to entertain, to make the reader curious and also to make the reader's mind active thinking and trying to understand better what happens. Last but not least the reader can also see that the narrator is always a first person narrator so it seems to be a diary, in fact it is also used a colloquial style to make the reader as a protagonist of the story.