'delicious riot of things': Aspects of discontinuity in "Tristram Shandy"

Tristram Shandy is a famously formless text in which the "life and opinions" of the title character appear to spill forth from the narrator without a governing theme or structure. Chronology and plot are interrupted and re-ordered. Characters are defined as mere fragments of personality, "strokes of a pen"; objects are represented as broken, snarled, and discombobulated. The subtexts and digressive tales included within the novel are incomplete as well as disruptive of the larger whole. Sterne withholds the "complete" picture a conventional novel provides, and fragmentation becomes the prevailing motif of his book: the author's motley meaning lies hidden in an abundance of disrupted and broken forms. I propose an examination of the multitude of discontinuous forms in Tristram Shandy, seen in narrative structures, characters, objects, and themes. My discussion concludes with discussion of time and mortality--Sterne's final implicit acknowledgment of the links between the novel's theme and form, and the narrator's vain flight from Death.