How The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman drew on Don Quixote
A documented line of influence: Laurence Sterne demonstrably engaged Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
Don Quixote
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra · 1605
RenaissanceThe influenced
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
Laurence Sterne · 1759
EnlightenmentRelevance
8/10
On The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman’s page
- The "Cervantick" humor Sterne advertised is Cervantes' — read Don Quixote and you'll catch the in-jokes, the Rosinante and Knight-of-the-Woeful-Countenance references scattered through Tristram Shandy
- Uncle Toby is Sterne's Quixote: the same lovable monomania, the same hobby-horse logic
- Tristram's habit of talking back to his own book begins in Don Quixote Part 2, where Cervantes first taught a novel to know it was a novel
On Don Quixote’s page
- Sterne called his own humor "Cervantick" — the word is his confession of where it all came from
- Uncle Toby is a Quixote in miniature: a gentle obsessive riding his hobby-horse the way the Knight rode Rosinante, and Sterne names them both
- The slyest debt is structural — the winking, self-aware narrator of Don Quixote's Part 2 is the model for Tristram's running game with his own reader