SOURCE: "Tristram Shandy and the Parody of Consciousness," in her Character and Consciousness in Eighteenth-Century Comic Fiction, The University of Georgia Press, 1992, pp. 100-18.

In the following essay, Kraft argues that Sterne saw narrative form as imperfect because a story is understood differently by each narrator as well as by each reader, and that thus through the pointedly chaotic form of Tristram Shandy, Sterne hoped to show that narrating a life cannot possibly result in the quantification or identification of that life.

Henry Fielding and Charlotte Lennox both regard the structurings of consciousness with a skeptical eye. Even so, they seem to accept with few questions the propensity of consciousness to seek narrative form; at least, that seems to be the operation of the mind that interests them the most—the way the individual consciousness puts together its experiential gleanings, the conclusions it draws, the revisions it makes...