Laurence Sterne's Novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy and A Cock and Bull Story

Laurence Sterne's novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman is often hailed as one of the most innovative of the eighteenth century due to its deviation from what little had been established as novelistic tradition by the time the first volume was published in 1759. Previously considered an impossible novel to adapt to film, in 2004 English director Michael Winterbottom set about that very task, ultimately producing Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story (2005). Like the novel, Winterbottom's film is also considered more experimental than traditional, though in different ways than Sterne's novel. On one hand, the experimental aspects of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy include the unique relationship cultivated by the novel between the narrator and the reader, as well as its retrospective and nonlinear departure from chronological storytelling and the degree to which the novel is self-conscious of its very status as a novel, while on the other A Cock and Bull Story plays with continuity editing, exposes the apparatus of the film's production, and utilizes characteristics of the relatively new "mockumentary" genre. In deviating from the traditional uses of conventional cinematic devices, Winterbottom's A Cock and Bull Story successfully portrays the experimental characteristics of Sterne's novel using the media of film.

One of the major experimental elements for which Tristram Shandy is so well known is the unique relationship forged between Sterne's narrator and the reader. As Betty Rizzo asserts in her article, "'How could you, Madam, be so inattentive?': Tristram's Relationship with the Reader," the relationship that develops between the narrator, in this case Tristram, and the reader during the course of this novel surpasses those created in the works of previous eighteenth century novelists like Fielding. As Rizzo writes: