Returning, for a moment, to the indeterminate pronoun it, there is a subtle moral component here, too. Conventions of grammar acknowledge, implicitly, some authority that prescribes the grammar. To renounce that authority, and especially to flaunt the game, is to undermine the regime of authority in general, and such defiance is just one aspect of Shandy s linguistic subversions. Perhaps we should go back, in true Shandean fashion, to the beginning. Such equivocation means about as much as locating the novel s Preface in the third volume.
Contradiction runs rampant.
Seeming to promise a complete story The Life and Opinions of . In one place Walter Shandy is one of the most regular men in every thing he did . There was that infinitude of oddities in him, and of chances along with it, by which handle he would take a thing, it baffled, Sir, all calculations. Given their context, each of the two statements is ludicrous on its own, and, taken together, their contradictory nature only grows. According to conventional economy, where more work earns more pay, readers extraordinary labor to find meaning in Tristram Shandy should entitle them to more meaning.