The humorous tradition that informs The Ponder Heart may be said to derive from Laurence Sterne's eighteenthcentury novel Tristram Shandy (17591767), a rollicking first-person narrative constructed almost entirely of digressions. Tristram is like Edna Earle in that he ingenuously exposes family foibles, telling more than is prudent to tell. A more recent precedent could be The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), another first-person narrative that derives its humor from the fact that the reader understands much that the teller does not. Later still are William Faulkner's tales of the Snopes clan. The Snopeses inhabit the same social stratum as the Peacocks, but are meaner and less comical.