SOURCE: "The Sermon, the King of Bohemia, and the Art of Interpolation in Tristram Shandy," in Studies in Philology, Vol. LXXV, No. 4, October 1978, pp. 472-91.

In the following essay, Rosenblum argues that there are two types of interruptions in the narrative of Tristram Shandy: the "digressions," which stresses the interconnectedness of things, and the "interpolations," which stress discontinuities in the accounts of events.

I

Our age likes to define man as a maker of fictions which he uses, legitimately or not, to make himself at home in the world. Man wants to orient himself in time and space, to discover his "whenabouts and whereabouts," and since neither one o'clock nor the boundaries of the state of New Jersey exist in nature, he invents temporal and spatial markers, such fictions as hours and days, latitude and longitude. Thus are established chronology and geography, arts which Uncle Toby tells Trim...