SOURCE: "The Irony of Character," in The Philosophical Irony of Laurence Sterne, University Presses of Florida, 1975, pp. 65-96.

Moglen examines the major characters of Tristram Shandy and concludes that, in addition to representing accurate portraits of the human condition, each is delineated via the same "diverse" and "eccentric" ways by which Sterne structured his novel.

Tristram Shandy is a novel of ideas. Its form is part of the idea, not a background for it, and the characters themselves are aspects of the intellectual quest, all constructed from some pivotal irony, subject to some central paradox, treated with sceptical insight as well as love. That is not to say that Steme's people are two-dimensional representatives of specific positions, spokesmen for the successive stages of a dialectical formula, as Traugott would have it. They inhabit their personalities quite fully, although it is true that their personalities are limited by the...