The plot, as the title suggests, is ostensibly Tristram 's narration of his life story. The title of the book is in itself a play on the novelistic formula that the readers of that time would have been familiar with- instead of describing the “life and adventures,” Sterne claims to present the “life and opinions” of the character. The life of Tristram Shandy introduces the readers to Tristram, the character but the opinions of Tristram are expressed through Tristram, the narrator and commentator. Thus, the novel becomes highly unconventional in its narrative technique and unfolds into a radically new kind of narrative. Even though Sterne’s novel incorporates a vast number of allusions and references to traditional works, there is relatively little in Tristram Shandy of the direct tradition of the eighteenth century novel. By the time Sterne began writing, a consistent mode of narrative fiction had been fully established but Sterne’s work was nothing like the orderly and structurally unified novels. Infact, Tristram Shandy can be seen as a parody of the typical novels of that time and thus it raised questions about the nature of fiction. This paper seeks to address the same question in the light of “The life and opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman.”
Sterne claimed that Tristram Shandy was “a picture of myself.” Ian Watt states that “Tristram’s character, or at least his temperament, is a humoursly self depreciating version of Sterne’s own sense of being dogged by every