The Ponder Heart | Literary Precedents
The humorous tradition that informs The Ponder Heart may be said to derive from Laurence Sterne's eighteenth-century novel Tristram Shandy (1759-1767), a rollicking first-person narrative constructed almost entirely of digressions. Tristram is like Edna Earle in that he ingenuously exposes family foibles, telling more than is prudent to tell. A more recent precedent could be The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), another first-person narrative that derives its humor from the fact that the reader understands much that the teller does not. Later still are William...
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