"I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me"
About this Quote
Sterne opens with a complaint that’s also a prank: the narrator frames his very existence as the result of parental negligence, then inflates that negligence into a mock-legal case about “duty” and proper procedure. The sentence performs the grievance it describes. It spirals, doubles back, stuffs itself with qualifications (“either... or indeed both... as they were in duty both equally bound”), until the reader feels the machinery of causation grinding noisily in real time. The joke is that the narrator is trying to litigate the un-litigatable: conception, fate, the random jolt that produces a self who now insists on having a cause worth suing over.
The subtext is less about sex than about authorship and control. In Tristram Shandy, being “begot” is the first of many accidents that steal sovereignty from the protagonist. Sterne turns metaphysical anxiety into comedy by letting bureaucratic language invade the bedroom; “minded what they were about” makes procreation sound like a botched paperwork task. It’s bawdy, but it’s also epistemological: if your origin is contingent, your story can’t be neat, your identity can’t be stable, and any attempt to narrate yourself becomes a farce of over-explanation.
Context matters: mid-18th-century Britain was saturated with Enlightenment confidence in reason, systems, and improvement. Sterne needles that confidence by showing how easily “reason” becomes after-the-fact rationalization. The line’s intent is to announce a novel that will refuse straight lines and tidy origins, using wit as a scalpel to expose the absurdity of demanding order from biology, family, and narrative itself.
The subtext is less about sex than about authorship and control. In Tristram Shandy, being “begot” is the first of many accidents that steal sovereignty from the protagonist. Sterne turns metaphysical anxiety into comedy by letting bureaucratic language invade the bedroom; “minded what they were about” makes procreation sound like a botched paperwork task. It’s bawdy, but it’s also epistemological: if your origin is contingent, your story can’t be neat, your identity can’t be stable, and any attempt to narrate yourself becomes a farce of over-explanation.
Context matters: mid-18th-century Britain was saturated with Enlightenment confidence in reason, systems, and improvement. Sterne needles that confidence by showing how easily “reason” becomes after-the-fact rationalization. The line’s intent is to announce a novel that will refuse straight lines and tidy origins, using wit as a scalpel to expose the absurdity of demanding order from biology, family, and narrative itself.
Quote Details
| Topic | Parenting |
|---|---|
| Source | Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759), opening sentence (first line of the novel). |
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