"It is difficult for the ininitiated reader to comprehend that there is a narrative line in a fiction that treats time as though it were a game of hopscotch in which the numbers have been placed at random and in which the author intrudes with instructions about composition and reading." (49. Spector, Robert D. "Structure as a Starting Point." Approaches to Teaching Sterne's Tristram Shandy. New, Melvyn, ed. New York: MLA, 1989. 49-54)
Reading Tristram Shandy for the first time, I was taken by the way Sterne deals with time and space. He does not follow a straight story line as did his contemporaries. The novel runs in circles around a story that never fully develops. Sterne is writing what later would develop to be called a stream of consciousness novel.
I present these references on Sterne's use of stream of consciousness and time/space relationships/digressions because they show ways that Sterne pioneered these techniques in a way that allows modern readers to feel a relationship with his work. His influence is felt in modern writers including Joyce, Woolf, and Vonnegut.
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James Tarling discusses Tristram Shandy's relationship with hypertext and Laurence Sterne's attempts to redefine books and how readers interact with writers.
Sterne's creative use of language, page layout, and digression creates on the page and in the mind of the reader a spacial relationship unlike that of his contemporaries. His story meanders through the life of the protagonist in a non-linear fashion, not unlike the meanderings of a normal conversation between two people, which, in fact, is what Tristram Shandy is all about. It is a conversation between an author, who is very aware that he is writing - a rather artificial manner of communication - and a reader, who is very aware that he is reading. Although the written page has been used for communication for many centruies, it creates a very static and artificial way to convey information. Until the advent of hypertext, it was a struggle for an author to converse interactively with a reader. Sterne was attempting to do just that: Have a conversation with his readers and allow the reader to engage in that conversation. Hypertext is our modern attempt at solving the same dilema.