Abstract

Tristram Shandy is characterized by its theatricality. Sterne gives us particulars of his characters' gestures and minute movements, and presents his characters as if they were actors on stage, or huge puppets that are under the control of Tristram, a puppeteer. The main purpose of Sterne's dramatic presentation is to bring metafictional dimensions of Tristram Shandy into relief. Sterne implicitly compares a stage-director's difficulties to those of a novelist, who needs to handle his narrative materials. Moreover, Sterne exposes the arbitrary nature of literary convention and the fictionality of a story by his playful chapter division and his invitation to his readers to help compose the story. In short, Sterne shows that all literature is a distortion of reality, a literary game. ;In a Sternean world without an absolute, all human activity becomes a game and a play, a substitute for the absolute or reality. The Shandy males play games, constructing their game worlds, worlds consisting of "words" or "things." Sterne shows the equality of their games by "deconstructing" any kind of distinction or hierarchy, and he refuses to distinguish between the great and the little because any distinction is based on ideological thinking, which imposes artificial patterns on reality. ;Human behavior is not game-free, either. It consists of role-playing, and man's identity can be created by imaginative role-playing, because human identity is neither given, nor fixed. Tristram and Yorick consciously play the role of a clown, which allows them to be inconsistent, exempting them from any possible attack on their violation of "decorum." Man, however, is inconsistent and inconstant by nature. He is obliged to "play a fool" in a world which is full of riddles and mysteries. In this respect, Sterne's role-playing and his concept of play is different from Derridean play, which denies the presence of meaning or absolute. Sterne' s denial of authority or an absolute is confined to a sublunary world. His skepticism is a healthy manifestation of his Christian belief in man's limitations and God's mysterious Providence. Though Sterne's novels have many postmodern elements, Sterne is an obvious classicist