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His impish description of his method of writing echoes the practitioners of this earlier style:

… of all the several ways of beginning a book which are now in practice throughout the known world, I am confident my own way of doing it is the best——I’m sure it is the most religious——for I begin with writing the first sentence——and trusting to Almighty God for the second. (VIII, ii, 436)

Any Renaissance writer of ambling prose could claim as much, if not as playfully. Certainly one recognizes here in a very different key Montaigne’s “I fall to without Premeditation, or Design, the first Word begets the second, and so to the End of the Chapter,” though who is the more religious is a moot point.2

Yet while Sterne anticipated many of the techniques of modern and postmodern writers in his book, he differs from twentieth-century practice in many ways. Tristram Shandy is not a stream-of-consciousness novel in which we eavesdrop on the protagonist’s thoughts, as in Joyce or Virginia Woolf, but a stream of self-consciousness, as we shall see. To take another example, it is tempting to speak of Sterne—a number of critics have—as being in some ways very like Beckett.3 Certainly Sterne’s unraveling of time in Tristram Shandy and his reweaving it into a kind of seamless web is suggestive of many modern novelists, and may encourage us to think of the book as an early analogue of Krapp’s Last Tape. And yet Beckett’s characteristic drive to turn everything into a single sentence or sound, his stance as the endless permutor of items within a closed field,4 differs greatly from the tendencies and stance of Sterne, whose work—strongly characterized by interruption, digression, aposiopesis—incorporates temporal possibilities that a closed field cannot contain. To see the differences between Sterne’s endgames and Beckett’s requires a different emphasis.

The function of time in Tristram Shandy has received a good deal of attention, but active understanding of Sterne must recognize that he rejects one idea of time in favor of another. In order to see how time functions in Sterne’s fiction, let us examine a passage from Tristram Shandy on David Garrick’s acting.5 This dialogue is the first of a series of attacks on bad critics, and it is worth noting that in a book so strongly related to the theatrical (and even the histrionic), Sterne begins the series with acting. Garrick’s naturalistic acting, which at times ran counter to the seeming requirements of the text, was indeed original and akin to Sterne’s method:

——And how did Garrick speak the soliloquy last night?—Oh, against all rule, my Lord,—most ungrammatically! betwixt the substantive and the adjective, which should agree together in number, case and gender, he made a breach thus,—stopping, as if the point wanted settling,——and betwixt the nominative case, which your lordship knows should govern the verb, he suspended his voice in the epilogue a dozen times, three seconds and three fifths by a stop-watch, my Lord, each time.———Admirable grammarian!———But in suspending his voice——was the sense suspended likewise? Did no expression of attitude or countenance fill up the chasm?—Was the eye silent? Did you narrowly look?—I look’d only at the stop-watch, my Lord.——Excellent observer! (III, xii, 140)

More important here than Garrick’s acting as such is Sterne’s opposition between two kinds of time. The critic, stopwatch in hand and looking narrowly only at it, goes by clock-time, but Garrick humanizes time by his “aposiopestick-break,” to use the apt phrase which Tristram later applies to Phutatorius (IV, xxvii, 255). Aposiopesis is a rhetorical figure in which the speaker breaks off, as though unable or unwilling to complete his sentence (or, perhaps, because his tobacco-pipe has snapped in two). The Critic need not be turned into an emblematic figure of death for us to realize that the time by which he goes is inhuman, that it lacks everything that makes human life worthwhile.

Garrick and his gestures remind us immediately of some of the most