SOURCE: "Structure, Language, Experience in the Novels of Laurence Sterne," in The First English Novelists: Essays in Understanding, Tennessee Studies in Literature Vol. 29, edited by J. M. Armistead, The University of Tennessee Press, 1985, pp. 185-223.

In the following essay, Anderson describes Sterne's novels as full of "surprises" and tries to show how a patient reader learns both to expect and be enlightened by these surprises (or unconventional narrative techniques) so that, ultimately, Sterne's novels "come to matter.…

Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey¹ are surprises waiting for readers. "I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me.…" Tristram's first words to us are urgent, without context, unintroduced. Here is Yorick: "They order, said I, this matter better in France." What the matter is, we...