On The Indeterminacy In Tristram Shandy

"I wrote not to be fed but to be famous."Laurence Sterne and his Tristram Shandy offer perhaps the most valuable case study of a mid-eighteenth century literary. His decision at age 45 to turn an author is uniquely premeditated, yet his uncertainty about the conditions of authorship in the literary world is equally remarkable. Both his self-consciousness and his confusion can be found in his letters, Tristram Shandy, and A Sentimental Journey. They make up the history of his struggle to discover what is meant to be an author in his time. The book, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent., is in a double sense identical with its subject: it embodies both Tristram's life and opinions and Sterne's act of writing. Tristram's opinions stand midway between his life and the life of Sterne's writing. An opinion is indeterminate, unfixed, a brief based not on absolute certainty or positive knowledge but what seems true to one's own mind. Tristram's book is ultimately an attempt to discover himself by divining his origins and identity within the context and history of his immediate family. Between chapters and incidents in the novel there is often no apparent connection. Blank pages, broken sentences, asterisks, dashes, and dots give graphic evidence of the reign of randomness, and of the aggressive ignoring for rules and accepted forms. By traditional standards, Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy is a disorderly production. As a result, readers of Tristram often complain that the novel lacks a plot, that they lost in the confusing time sequences and that the narrator doesn't seem to have any plan for his story.This paper is will analyze Tristram Shandy from the aspect of indeterminacy of the postmodernism theory. The paper will be divided into four chapters. The first chapter will analyze the indeterminacy in the plots of Tristram Shandy from its indeterminate structure, narrator's association of ideas and the temporal duration in plots. The second chapter will analyze the indeterminacy in themes through three main themes, language, death and nightmare world of empiricism in this novel. The third chapter will analyze the identities of Sterne, his two spokesmen– Tristram and Yorick, and the reader of this novel to show their indeterminate identities and the indeterminate relationship between them. At the end of this paper I will look into the conversational style language and the rhetorical irony to find the indeterminacy in the language of Tristram Shandy. Through the above analysis this paper brings to the conclusion that Tristram Shandy is a novel ahead of its time in 18th century. Laurence Sterne innovates the form of novel and the use of language in this experimental novel, so Tristram Shandy is a novel of novel. It has already has the characteristics of postmodernism novels, especially in the aspect of the indeterminacy.