Tristram Shandy Literary Elements

Fiction

Britain, 1700s; Rural

First-Person Limited; written as an autobiography

Tone- Didactic, affectionate
Mood- Bemused

Protagonist - Tristram, his uncle, and parents; Antagonist - the circumstances of his birth

Tristram is drawn to write his autobiography, but his name and physical bearing leave him with a defeat to his sense of self that he cannot easily overcome

During a flashback, when Tristram's mother gives birth to him

Shandy foreshadows the elements of himself that are considered to be unfortunate before they are fully introduced

Tristram routinely uses understatement to enhance the scene he depicts; an example of this is Yorick's sermon

The novel alludes to classical pieces of Latin and Greek, at some points including unedited paragraphs or pages

Sterne uses imagery of ideas, imagery of Tristram's nose and birth, and imagery of Tristram's parents' rituals, particularly one involving winding their clock

Tristram writes his life, but he spends so much time writing that more of his life is lived and must be written

The plot before Yorick's death has many parallels with the later plot of the novel, which is written in flashback. One of these is the similarity in path of Tristram's parents' relationship

Metonymy - Toby uses metonymy throughout his rhapsodies of war to describe troops and troop movements
Synecdoche - noses as part of individuals

Because of Shandy's chatty tone, many objects throughout the text are personified.
"Triumph swam in my father's eyes, at the repartee--the Attic salt brought water into them--and so Obadiah heard no more about it" (284).