With irony, which is the spirit of this book, he uncovers his relation to the world and people, from politics, through religion and philosophy to his friendship with ass.
However, his opinions and life events, it means those of Tristram Shandy, are not absolutely dominant; opinions and the life of his father Valter Shandy have the same value (importance) and maybe it would not be so unfair to think
about renaming the title of the book to: The Opinions And Life Of Tristram Shandy (according to the quantitative appearance in the book), or even, to copy the reality of the book, to: The Life And Opinions Of The Shandies. However, if the story is not absolutely only about the life and opinions of Tristram Shandy, what is then about?
The main story is not very complex and therefore difficult to understand – it develops and is built on life episodes and strange but interesting relation between two brothers, thinking in absolutely different ways. One of them is Uncle Toby, a bit uneducated and naive but pleasant man, and the other is Tristram’s father, Valter Shandy, a sympathetic intellectual thinking whenever and wherever. Every one of them has his own hobby: for Uncle Toby, it is everything what is connected with wars, battles and arms and for Valter Shandy, it is thinking, analysing and doing philosophy. There are also others who enter the story, from all we can mention for example Toby’s servant Trim, Valter’s servant Obadiah or reserved Dr. Slop. What makes this book complex and exceptional (what is different from all the books written until then) is the way by which author approached to the writing of this novel and which influenced other important writers, such as James Joyce, Marcel Proust or even, from the contemporary writers, Milan Kundera.
He put the telling of the story into the hands of a storyteller who finds himself in a position of a person whose next steps are barely predictable. He is the one who manipulates and arranges the whole story. The story is not therefore written in a chronological order but the episodes are mixed one with another. The work is not complicated only in the horizontal line but also in the vertical line where the plot is interrupted and slowed down by numerous digressions and author’s comments.
Once the book is read, it is evident that the author is a very original person. Always trying to find another way how to enrich his work and to surprise and attract the reader, he shows us ways how to do it: it is the presence of, for example, strange chapters, concretely missing ones, mixed ones or even chapters with their numbers but without any text in it, unfinished stories or sentences, “star” sentences, writing about how and why is he writing (it means writing about writing) and so on.