In the very first page in this book The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman which is chapter 1 and page 1, the narrator, Tristram Shandy, describes the moment that his parents were having sex. During that moment, his mother interrupted his father because he did not wind up the clock, which was the signal of having sex. On the movie ‘Cock and Bull Story’ also has this scene and Tristram Shandy thinks that every bad and unfortunate thing is already made before he was born.

Tristram says about ‘animal spirits, as how they are transfused from father to son’. (5) I think that Tristram thinks that because of his mother’s interruption made his father’s emotion was not happy and that unhappiness was transfused to his son during the production of Tristram Shandy. In the foot note, it says that stern draws principally on John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding which had great influence on eighteenth century epistemology, or the theory of knowledge, however, the explanation on foot note about ‘animal sprits’ are much different with Tristram’s use of that word which is just saying his parents’ unhappiness passed to unborn (even unmade I think) Tristram and unexpected happening (because his father did not wind up the clock) has effect on his future life. The foot note says “though it remains uncertain whether Sterne had really studied the Essay, or was simply familiar with some of its principal ideas” (542) and I think that the author Laurence Sterne used theory as his own interpretation of that.

work citation:

Sterne, Laurence, and Ian Campbell. Ross. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009. Print.