ABSTRACT
At first, the generally sedentary Tristram, working on his 'Life and Opinions' in his study, would seem the antithesis of the compulsively errant heroes of the Furioso and Quijote, or indeed of the travellers whose journeys are depicted by Scarron and Fielding. In a physical sense, with the important exception of the journey through France in volume VII, the topography of Tristram Shandy is intimately—perhaps even claustrophobically—confined to Shandy Hall and its immediate environs. Sterne's narrative, however, is characterized by its irrepressible dynamism: Tristram flits from one subject to another as easily as Don Quijote moves from one misadventure to the next. The physical errancy of the hero, in other words, has been almost entirely displaced by the intellectual or imaginative errancy of the narrator. The connection between these two forms of errancy is at its most striking in the figurative language adopted by Sterne, but is not confined to the metaphorical level. Each of the works examined above uses to varying degrees the journey topos as a frame into which interpolations and digressions may be inserted; in Tristram Shandy, the 'Life of the narrator, the writing of his autobiography, constitutes the journey and therefore frame through which Sterne subverts the topographical conventions of interpolating narrative.
