Now I am going to analyse an extract from Sterne's book "The Life and Opinion of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman".

Right from the title you can see that characters became central and it represents a landmark innovation and an experimentation of the novel. You can understand from the title the idea of the novelist talking about a characters opinion.

An opinion is the result of somebody's analysis and decisions.

As the text says it is "a very unconventional novel" and Sterne doesn't follow a chronological order of the elements.

Right from the text you can see this unconventional order when the protagonist speaks about what happened before he was borne, exact what happened during his conception.

Metafictional attitude is the way how the novelist is reflecting what he is doing and it is a type of fiction that self-consciously addresses the devices of fiction, exposing the fictional illusion.

Another innovation is the deviation of the conventional structure of the novel.

Tristram Shandy, the main character, who at the beginning of the novel is not born yet, is an example for the unconventional chronological structure of the novel. Tristram's father, Walter Shandy,  is a man "fond of theories", that means you have to studying the rules and if you doesn't follow the rules you can not understand what you say.

This rules that "nobody understands" underline the high intellectual level of Tristram's father. The main characters are presented through what Sterne calls their "hobbyhorses", which may be defined as the way they uses the language. You can see that considering what they speaking about. They speak about their experiences and what they are obsessed with: Walter Shady speaks about scientific theories or Corporal Trim and Uncle Toby about fortifications and military history.

On text you have a lot of quotations. A lot of quotations implies that he writes the text using other texts for references. And in addition he distinguishes his way of writing in front of Horace; he speaks with Horace, that implies another brick of conventional rules.

The narrator invites  the reader to "skip over" the remaining part of this chapter "if he are not curious". The word "curious" is addressed only for intelligent reader, so it followed to "shut the door" that means go out if you don't understand the story.

The next part of the text begins with the information of the days he was "begot". It happened "betwixt the first Sunday and the first Monday in the mouth of March in the year of 1718".

These small  deviations keep the reader attention and curiosity. In fact the reader is invite to use the brain to understand all what happens. The function is to entertain the reader.

Tristram's father was "one of the most regular man in everything he did" and "he had made it a rule" that implies a very precise person. Thanks his regularity Tristram is knowing the exact period of his conception.