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words. The life of the author is coterminous with his book. When Tristram vows to do something “as long as I live or write,” he adds parenthetically “which in my case means the same thing” (III, iv, 127). The suggestion that the end of the story coincides with the conclusion of life itself is conveyed by an unremarkable locution that appears several times. Early in the book Tristram describes Yorick as faced with the necessity of riding his pitiful horse “to the very end of the chapter” (I, x, 15). The use of this commonplace phrase as a euphemism for death is particularly apt because writing and living are identified as strongly here as anywhere in literature. Needless to say, the idea does not originate with Sterne. Swift’s hack in A Tale of a Tub, which has such a pervasive influence on Tristram Shandy, suggests that “The Conclusion of a Treatise, resembles the Conclusion of Human Life.…”7 And Samuel Johnson’s Idler No. 103 discusses the “secret horrour of the last,” claiming that “[t]hough the Idler and his readers have contracted no close friendship they are perhaps both unwilling to part. There are few things not purely evil, of which we can say, without some uneasiness, ‘this is the last.’ ”8 He ascribes such feelings to our strong awareness of human mortality. Yet Sterne unquestionably develops the theme to proportions it does not have elsewhere.

Sterne would extend human time by making our imaginations take over where his sentences break off. The visual gestures as well as the typographical tricks exist to bring about this exchange between Sterne’s storytellers and his reader. Here too is the main point of Sterne’s notorious double entendres and innuendos—noses, whiskers, and asterisks may or may not mean what they seem to. It’s all in your dirty mind, as the folk saying has it. Sterne would tease us into, as well as out of, thought.9 The typical conclusion to a volume, especially one that completes a two-volume segment of the novel, is a promise of mystification until the tale is resumed (e.g., II, xix; IV, xxxii). Tristram promises to leave the reader puzzling over the solutions for a full year (or more), the time it will take for the next volumes to appear. This relationship of Sterne to his readers was one of the things to which Oliver Goldsmith objected in his account of Tristram Shandy in The Citizen of the World: “He must talk in riddles and then send them to bed to dream of the solution” (Letter LIII). What Sterne recognizes is that nothing can remain at a point of stasis. His own “vile cough” and his rapidly approaching death from tuberculosis, the subject of Book VII of Tristram Shandy, make this painfully evident.

Trying to place Sterne’s awareness of death in proper perspective, William Bowman Piper claims that Tristram’s admission of his failure to narrate events that he should have reached already “make[s] us think ‘poor Tristram, his time is running out.’ By describing himself thus, Tristram presents himself as a comic victim rather than as a tragic sufferer of time’s dreadful working.”10 Although this reading makes the comedy rightly dominant, we are more likely to recognize what fun Tristram has in delaying his story, and we should see that telling the story this way keeps him in a relationship with his reader. Although his “work is digressive, and it is progressive too,—and at the same time” (I, xxii, 54), he loves digression (“Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine;——they are the life, the soul of reading”), not progression. Tristram’s continual leaps through the association of ideas to different times keep clock-time from its habitual tyranny—and we might remember that he was even conceived in a moment when clock-time may have been still. By slowing down the pace of the story so that he cannot possibly finish, he avoids the finality of all conclusions. Frank Kermode speaks of clock-time as “tick-tock,” a beginning and an ending.11 Tristram keeps on ticking because he avoids tock. This is one of the things that makes the novel so unsettling for the reader from sentence to sentence and