Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy is the first post-modern novel, but he wrote it before the modernist movement. Thus, it ought to be considered apart from the modern literary consciousness; the biggest challenge for the modern reader is noticing the experimental aspects of the novel without placing it in line with the later works of post-modernism.
Tristram Shandy absolutely impacted the post-modern landscape, but it first impacted the literature of its era and the era after it. Because of the two paths to the modern-day influence - the direct and the indirect - the most effective analysis of the novel is of the novel itself. Tristram presents his content to the reader using digressions, and these first appear to be superfluous. However, these introduce entire narratives, so Shandy's drawing of the reader's focus to himself allows the expansion of storylines which recall time spent with the other individuals instead of a heavy-handed push to other moments. Tristram Shandy thus uses overtly clumsy narratorial techniques to direct the awareness of the reader throughout the novel without disruption.
The result of these transitions is a sense of how life and death can exist at once. A character who dies may resurface as alive in later passages, and this timeline is held as rational, even linear, through the mind of Tristram. Tristram threads his memories together not just as a series of impulses leading from one to the next but instead as an expansion of specific characters who he holds in his mind, with plot as something which occurs instead of something which creates individuals.
A key motif of the novel is Tristram's sense of misfortune concerning his own birth, and the fractured sense of his own self-conception supports the importance of this motif; from the beginning, Tristram shows himself to be the result of actions, even as he does not consider how the character of others may result from temporal and even external influences. The fictitious Tristram cannot continue to write his memoirs until he separates himself from his own trauma enough to consider himself as a person who exists outside of the presence of mistakes.
