The Associative Mind: Laurence Sterne's Critique of the Linear Self

Lockean Consciousness and the Narrative Disorder of Tristram Shandy

Introduction: The Disorder of Consciousness

“Writing, when properly managed,” declares the narrator of Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, “is but a different name for conversation” (Sterne 89). This famous aphorism is often taken as a simple defence of the novel’s bewildering digressions and chaotic structure. Yet it contains the key to a much deeper intellectual project. This article argues that Sterne’s narrative innovations are not mere formal eccentricities but a profound literary enactment of Lockean associationism, using digressive, improvisational structures to model the chaotic, non-linear nature of consciousness itself. Far from being an act of whimsical rebellion, Tristram Shandy weaponizes the “conversation” of writing to mount a sophisticated critique of the very possibility of linear autobiography and stable selfhood in the Age of Reason.

While literary history, following Ian Watt, has traditionally framed the 18th-century novel in terms of its “formal realism” and its drive to chart the development of a coherent individual (Watt 32), Sterne’s work stands in radical opposition. He does not chart a life; he performs the impossibility of the task. By directly translating the associative, interruptible, and often irrational processes of the human mind onto the page, Sterne challenges the Enlightenment’s faith in a rationally ordered self, suggesting instead that identity is a perpetually unfinished, improvisational performance.

Theoretical Framework: John Locke and the Association of Ideas

To understand Sterne’s method, one must first turn to his contemporary, the philosopher John Locke. In his hugely influential An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke posited that the mind is not a vessel of innate ideas but a tabula rasa (blank slate) upon which experience writes. Knowledge is built from simple sensory impressions that the mind then combines into complex thoughts. Crucially, Locke added a chapter on “The Association of Ideas,” which he described as a kind of cognitive malfunction—a “wrong connexion of ideas” that leads to irrational beliefs and prejudices (Locke 395). For Locke, these accidental, illogical links were a source of human error.

Sterne, however, seizes upon this Lockean “malfunction” and elevates it to his primary narrative principle. He recognizes that this associative process, whether rational or not, is how the mind actually works. The entire Shandy household is governed by it. Walter Shandy’s obsessive theories, Uncle Toby’s military hobby-horse, and Tristram’s own inability to narrate his birth are all driven by the “wrong connexion of ideas.” A single word—like “nose” or “bridge”—can send a character’s mind careening down a tangential path, derailing the narrative for dozens of pages. Sterne thus transforms a philosophical footnote on cognitive error into the central engine of his novel, suggesting that human consciousness is not a linear chain of reason but a chaotic web of associations.

The Shandean Mind as a Lockean Theatre

Tristram Shandy is less a story of a life than a direct transcription of a mind at work. The novel’s plot is famously stalled; Tristram, the narrator, struggles for hundreds of pages merely to get himself born. This narrative paralysis is the point. Every attempt to proceed in a straight line is defeated by an associative leap. As Tristram himself explains:

Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine;—they are the life, the soul of reading;—take them out of this book for instance,—you might as well take the book along with them. (Sterne 56)

For Sterne, these are not departures from the story; they are the story. Uncle Toby’s obsession with fortifications, for example, is a perfect illustration of a mind trapped in an associative loop. The memory of a wound in his groin becomes inextricably linked with the science of ballistics and siege warfare, so that any mention of love or courtship is immediately rerouted through the language of military campaigns. This is not just a character quirk; it is a clinical demonstration of a Lockean “hobby-horse”—a ruling passion built on a powerful but arbitrary association of ideas. Sterne shows how these private mental maps dictate our experience of reality, making objective, linear storytelling impossible.

Writing as Conversation: A Critique of Autobiography

By styling his novel as a “conversation,” Sterne launches his most potent critique. The traditional autobiography pretends to be a monologue, a single, authoritative voice recounting a life from a stable, retrospective viewpoint. Sterne shatters this illusion. His narrator is constantly interrupted—by his characters, by his imagined reader (“Madam”), and most of all, by the unruly associations of his own mind. The act of writing becomes a social, dynamic, and unstable event, much like the 18th-century culture of sociable conversation that scholars like John Mullan have documented (Mullan 45).

This conversational mode proves that a life cannot be told in a straight line because it is not lived or remembered that way. Memory is not a chronological archive but an associative tangle. In attempting to narrate his own life, Tristram demonstrates that the “self” is not a fixed entity to be documented but a fluid process that is continually being constructed and reconstructed in the very act of telling. The novel’s famous formal tricks—the marbled page, the blank page, the misplaced chapters—are not gimmicks. They are visual representations of the mind’s refusal to be contained by the linear logic of the printed book. The story of a life, Sterne suggests, is fundamentally un-writable in any conventional sense.

Conclusion: The Improvisational Self

Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy remains a revolutionary text precisely because its formal chaos is so deeply philosophical. By taking John Locke’s theory of the associative mind and pushing it to its literary extreme, Sterne presents a radical model of human consciousness. He dismantles the conventions of realism and autobiography not for the sake of mere novelty, but to make a profound argument about the nature of the self. In the Shandean world, identity is not a stable essence to be discovered or recounted but an ongoing, improvisational performance shaped by the unpredictable connections of memory, language, and desire. The novel’s ultimate lesson is that the project of telling a life in a straight line is doomed from the start, for the simple reason that the human mind—the very instrument of telling—is a glorious, chaotic, and digressive machine.

This article was developed through an iterative collaboration between our Editor-in-Chief and multiple AI language models. Various LLMs contributed at different stages—from initial ideation and drafting to refinement and technical review. Each AI served as a creative and analytical partner, while human editors maintained final oversight, ensuring accuracy, quality, and alignment with AuthZ's editorial standards.