The action of Shandean dullness, as we have seen, unfolds as radically satiric: arrogant self-deceptions produce social conflict and self-defeat. Witness once again the family “harmony” disrupted by Walter's self-indulgent research on Slawkenbergius, which secures neither the nose nor the future of Tristram (3: 277). We have also seen, however, that Shandean self-deceptions derive as well from self-preserving yet generous instincts fused with conscious benevolence in efforts for social union. Note once more Tristram's efforts on behalf of “friends,” partially described in the previous chapter. All comic characters, says Alvin Kernan, possess this vitality to preserve and give the self, and these efforts to reconstruct dull society on a benevolent foundation, explains Northrop Frye, define the goal of comic action. Because comic characters seek survival and freedom renewed in social union, they have the will to triumph over the “blocking forces” of dullness and the absurd mischances that together challenge their efforts to order human existence.

Writing his life and opinions for the sake of friendship defines Tristram's comic will to preserve himself and to unite others, a will, says William V. Holtz, that Tristram shares with his creator. The degree to which Sterne's art depicts the “comic triumph of life” over dullness will be the primary concern of this chapter (Kernan 1965, 187). To define the comic view of human limitations, I will first return to Tristram's story of Yorick, the parson whom Tristram endorses, before and beyond the black pages, for what Kernan calls his comic spirit, his warmth, and his wit. I will then follow John Stedmond in using Yorick to measure the dullness of Tristram's world; departing from Stedmond, however, I will show that Tristram purposely resurrects Yorick the jester not only to help him win friends through laughter but also to sharpen the contrast between Walter's educational follies and the learning abused by the worldly dull.

I will turn then to Tristram's self-assertive comic struggle against what Kernan calls the “ludicrous minutiae” that fill his family's past and prevent the telling of all. In Kernan's view, Tristram deprives his autobiography of the “dignity” he would give it when he insists on recounting past “trivialities” such as the ridiculousness of his naming and circumcision ceremonies (Kernan 1965, 96).