NP but Sterne

[Mark Kohut]

There are Pynchon-like lists in Tristram Shandy.

That is all.

No, that is not all. I'll consolidate a couple-three posts.

Sterne uses the word *traverse *a couple-three times in the early 'books'
[published as 8 short books, two at a time, over seven years. Imagine] with
its
older meanings. .................Traverse: move (something) back and forth
or sideways . "a probe is traversed along the tunnel".

Seems, perhaps, a finer meaning behind TRP's Traverse family as it/they
traverse along the entire corpus of his work.

There is a scene that one comes upon without warning, a surprise, in
Tristram Shandy which hit me a little, ass-backwards in chronological
reading, as
the slave scene with Dixon does in M & D. Suddenly, two main characters
remember a whipping on a ship--an unjust one, the most sensitive
cringes and reacts against even in memory....whipped for someone else's
theft...

Halfway through the books, (or maybe earlier too) but certainly repeated as
a leitmotif at midpoint, TS starts throwing around the concept of "chance".

Another nod to Morris's plotlessness theme......midway in one chapter,
again, as random as any fictional choice, it seems....the narrator,
Tristram sez:
"Strike a line here across the paper, Tristram---I strike it--and hey for a
new chapter."