I am analysing The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, a Gentleman, a novel by Laurence Sterne. It was published in nine volumes. This novel is very difficult to summarize because it does not follow the usual, conventional plots of previous ages. As a matter of fact, the author jumps from the beginning of a story to its conclusion, inserting some developments, opinions, blank pages, comments, mishaps and other devices (different techniques) which continuously interrupt the chronological development of the narration. However, the intelligent reader, though with some difficulties, can try to read the story and not lose the point.

If the title has to be analysed, it clearly appears a marked difference between this novel and all previous works since the frontispiece of his novel gives the reader a clear-cut idea of what he will find in the novel: not only the life of a character (in this case Tristram Shandy), but also his opinions. Differently from previous novels, the one I am analysing gives the reader a considerable quantity of accurate information about the character, and this was not present in previous novels as for example Robinson Crusoe.

The narrator is first person and he is the same as the main character: however, in this way, the reader is not free to make and develop his own opinion about the events occurring in the book since they are filtered by the speaking voice.

I am analysing an extract from Volume I Chapter IV entitled Tristram's conception.

The first nineteen lines are a very deep introduction for the reader who has to know since the beginning, or as Horace says, Ab Ovo, what he is going to find in this extract. The sentence "as my life and opinions are likely to make some noise in the world" is absolutely clear about the self-reference the author makes: he quotes Montaigne, John Bunyan' s Pilgrim's Progress and Horace. Doing this he gives the reader the proof that he has a very deep culture.

After this short introduction, the "real" story begins. The author gives abundant details about the night when he was begot and he his very sure that that night was the correct one. He goes on stating that there is another episode which was known only in his family, but he deems necessary to remind it to the reader to specify the whole story. While still only a homunculus, Tristram's implantation within his mother's womb was disturbed. At the very moment of procreation, his mother asked his father if he had remembered to wind the clock. The distraction and annoyance led to the disruption of the proper balance of humors necessary to conceive a well-favored child.

Tristram says that his father was a merchant and he was of the most regular men in the world, a perfect sample of exactness. Between his fifty and sixty years of age he gradually started to decrease his family commitments (concernments) because he was very plagued about them. So he avoided them for the rest of the month. Suddenly Tristram had a misfortune falling upon himself: his father started a journey to London with Tristram's brother and it seemed that he came back only in the second week of the following month. The extract ends up when Tristram leaves the reader with a question and an answer, asking the reader to think of them.  

According to my opinion the language used by the author is not of immediate understanding. This difficulty arises from both the words he uses and the concepts he expresses. An example of this can be found in the introductory lines when he quotes Montaigne, whose works I am not aware of, and in the final lines of this first part when he uses the adjective "inquisitive" since its sound can be misleading for the Italians (inquisitivo or inquisitorio) and its real meaning refers to a curious person.