Tristram's Identity Revisited.

Abstract

This article briefly connects the postulates of four authors from very different backgrounds with the manner in which the issue of personal identity is dealt with in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. The chosen thinkers are John Locke, David Hume, Jacques Lacan, and Jean Baudrillard. Locke’s ideas on language, knowledge, and personal identity will be contrasted with those of Sterne. Then, the article will discuss Hume’s theories on associationism and his conviction that the notion of the “I” is a mere illusion created by human memory. As to Lacan and Baudrillard, the former’s theory of “the mirror stage”, and the concepts of simulation and hyperreality put forward by the latter will be compared with the ideas underlying Tristram Shandy. In this manner, by the end of the article I will have elaborated a gradient in which Locke is very distant from Sterne’s world view and Baudrillard occupies the closest position, while both Hume and Lacan can be placed in the middle of that gradient.