Context: Laurence Sterne's novel displays his whimsical nature as an author throughout. He uses such tricks of typography as blank pages, black pages, pointing fingers, and a large assortment of dots, dashes, and asterisks. Even the Preface is at an unusual place, not being found by the reader till he reaches the twentieth chapter of Book III. The very end of the novel is as whimsical as the portions that precede it. The final chapter begins with Mr. Walter Shandy, Tristram's father, discoursing upon idiosyncrasies of man's attitudes toward sex, as compared to those we have about the honor attached to the killing of men, especially in war. While he is speaking he is interrupted by one of his tenants, who has come with a complaint about the bull that Walter Shandy keeps to serve the cows of the parish. The tenant's wife has been brought to bed with a child some six weeks before, but the man's cow, which should have calved at the same time, has not produced an offspring. At the end of the conversation which follows, about the bull and his paternal abilities, Mrs. Shandy asks what the story is all about. Parson Yorick comments to her about the story of the bull, but the ambiguity of his comment goes further, being a statement as well about the novel which Laurence Sterne has laid before the reader.