SOURCE: "The Problem of Interpretation or Criticism under the Aspect of the Hobby-Horse: Hermeneutics and Hobby-Horses," in his Reflexivity in Tristram Shandy: An Essay in Phenomenological Criticism, Yale University Press, 1977, pp. 6-25.

In the following excerpt, Swearingen suggests that Sterne has created a narrator in Tristram Shandy whose intent is "self-interpretation" in order to sort out the perpetual "misinterpretation" that dogs his family and, consequently, his own life.

It will eventually be argued in this discussion that Tristram's whole enterprise is a hermeneutics, a process of self-interpretation which is required by his awareness of being part of a family and of a tradition in which there has been serious misinterpretation. It is not surprising that the parson whose sermons interpret biblical texts by imaginatively filling out the human setting of those texts should raise the problem of a general hermeneutics in a work that professes to give an...