The Visual Devices In Laurence Sterne's “Tristram Shandy“

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ram Shandy (pg. 8) illustrates the actual movement of a door shutting. The door in question is the one to Mr. and Mrs. Shandy’s bedroom in the moment of Tristram’s conception and the text that follows is, as Tristram says, “only for the curious and inquisitive”. The lines flanking this sentence can be seen as a kind of warning for a more chaste and decorous reader to skip the next few paragraphs.
Tristram concludes his grieving account of the death of the parson Yorick by inserting a black space shaped like a tombstone (pg. 25). His epitaph: “Alas, poor Yorick!”, which is borrowed from Shakespeare, is framed and looks like an inscription on an actual grave. Sterne plays with the conventions of book publishing and uses this graphic shocker to startle the reader more than words could. Yet we also laugh with awkwardness, because book pages are not supposed to be shrouded in grief. The blackness of the page represents the finality of death better then language could and makes it more tangible and tactile, ...