SOURCE: "The Self-Serving Narrator," in his Tristram Shandy: The Games of Pleasure, University of California Press, 1973, pp. 93-130.

In the following essay, Lanham contends that seemingly random interruptions of the main narrative by the protagonist/narrator of Tristram Shandy derive from classical examples of digression.

I

Tristram's fondness for philosophically justified digression has bemused his admirers into overlooking the older narrative pattern from which the digressions depart. For all his joking about Locke's history-book, Tristram was writing one himself, an intellectual autobiography. His proceedings will be those of a classic chronicler, he declares early in Book I:

He will have views and prospects to himself perpetually solliciting his eye, which he can no more help standing still to look at than he cari fly; he will moreover have various

Accounts to reconcile:
Anecdotes to pick up:
Inscriptions to make out:
Stories to weave in:
Traditions to sift:
Personages...