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Time wastes too fast: every letter I trace tells me with what rapidity Life follows my pen; the days and hours of it, more precious, my dear Jenny! than the rubies about thy neck, are flying over our heads like light clouds of a windy day, never to return more——every thing presses on——whilst thou are twisting that lock,——see! it grows grey; and every time I kiss thy hand to bid adieu, and every absence which follows it, are preludes to that eternal separation which we are shortly to make.——(IX, viii, 494)

Yet this flow of time, which promises only age and death, contains an infinite number of possible moments of communication, and if instead of riding posthaste to the end (“as a muleteer drives on his mule”), one strikes the communicative pose (like Garrick or Trim or Tristram himself), human time can come into existence and perhaps stave off the end a bit longer.

This postponement, then, is a prime function of the Sternean dash. Sterne works toward a maximum number of moments of possible communication with his reader, and each dash is a gesture that permits the reader to extend in his own mind the implications of what has been said. It is Sterne’s partial solution to the problem of solipsism—more radical than the attempt in Fielding’s fiction—that is at the heart of the novel. This procedure, and not the asides to Sir or Madam, bears the weight of Tristram’s claim that

[w]riting, when properly managed, (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversation: As no one, who knows what he is about in good company, would venture to talk all;—so no author, who understands the just boundaries of decorum and good breeding, would presume to think all: The truest respect which you can pay to the reader’s understanding, is to halve this matter amicably, and leave him something to imagine, in his turn, as well as yourself.

For my own part, I am eternally paying him compliments of this kind, and do all that lies in my power to keep his imagination as busy as my own. (II, xi, 83–84)

Of course, the text does not and cannot give us evenhanded conversation, and Tristram as narrator has the stage all to himself. There is no conversation (and conversation in the eighteenth century had the ambiguous quality that intercourse does today), only words on a page. Tristram’s use of dashes has been compared to “breathless conversation,” perhaps that of the nonstop talker who seems at times like an eighteenth-century version of the stand-up comedian (permitting or encouraging a few exchanges with his audience) or the free-associating Freudian patient on the couch.

Not long after presenting his conversational ideal, Tristram lets the reader know that “I would go fifty miles on foot … to kiss the hand of that man whose generous heart will give up the reins of his imagination into his author’s hands,——be pleased he knows not why, and cares not wherefore” (III, xii, 141). In other words, Tristram would willingly go far out of his way and abase himself, provided that he is given control by a reader whose “imagination” begins to look suspiciously like the hobbyhorse Tristram intends to ride.

The ambiguity of this narrative stance might be clarified by an analogue in art, Parmigianino’s Mannerist Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. The artist peers out directly into our eyes. And yet the curve of the mirror, which distorts the surfaces and causes his near hand to assume huge proportions, makes readily apparent the fact that the artist is looking into a mirror, even if we might be slow to draw that inference from a typical self-portrait. Tristram too has his eye seemingly on his audience, and at the same time he is looking self-consciously at none but himself.

Nevertheless, Tristram’s promise to keep the reader’s imagination as busy as his own is hardly an exaggeration. Tristram is an English Scheherazade who knows that when the story ends death will follow. The consumptive Tristram wants to make his words last while realizing they may be his last