Into the fictional woods of Tristram Shandy: reader and narrator between the lines

Abstract

This work analyzes the figurations of the reader in Tristram Shandy, byLaurence Sterne, based on the ideas of Umberto Eco, Gerard Genette, andMaurice Blanchot, which focus on the relationship between narrator andreader, and the aesthetic effect resulting from formal techniques. In face of a self-conscious narrator-author-character, the play with the limits of reality and imagination are frequent, and it challenges the most diversekinds of readers even in contemporaneity. Reflecting about the act ofreading, the text performs the actions of multiple kinds of readers throughthe narrator’s discourse. Considered by Virginia Woolf the forerunnerof the modern novel, Sterne’s work causes discrepancy regarding theinterpretation of its form as it will be discussed here, by the point of beingsometimes better comprehended by shandean writers that took the novelas a reference, re-signifying the mimesis and the literary form.