The Ideal Reader in Don Juan and Tristram Shandy Anonymous College

Byron called Don Juan ‘the poetical Tristram Shandy’, and both works appear consciously intertextual in their attempts to question held beliefs about storytelling. They both define an ideal reader by everything that they should not be, and attempt to create an atmosphere of uncertainty through the satirical contradictions of their own works. Their differences, however, appear to be in method: Byron attempts to fulfill his target of formal perfection and moral uncertainty, whereas Sterne experimentally portrays and then subverts different approaches to storytelling throughout, leaving readers constantly uncertain about his sincerity.

Laurence Sterne’s style in Tristram Shandy pushes the ‘shaggy dog’ method of storytelling to its logical extreme, creating a narrative that interrupts itself constantly and explores tangents with little consideration to the linear plot. As Melvyn New observes, however, Sterne has created an irrational narrator through purposeful and intricately planned style: a ‘carefully crafted impression of carelessness and abandon.’ The illogical series of events and confused chronology is begun by his promise to start from the beginning, and ‘to go on tracing every thing in it, as Horace says, ab Ovo’, and this...