What makes the narration of Tristram Shandy so striking is that we are never allowed to forget that everything we learn reaches us mediated by the idiosyncratic voice of Tristram himself. You could put it more strongly than this and say that the telling of events constitutes the main event, as would later become the case in many twentieth-century novels: “There is the story of one's hero,” Henry James wrote of his novel The Ambassadors (1903), “and then … the story of one's story itself.” That novels are never simply unfolding before our eyes but are narrated from somewhere is one of the most important factors to keep in mind as we read them. Although other predominantly narrative forms such as theater and film have strategies of their own to direct our perceptions and make particular meanings possible, they usually present events as if they are happening before our eyes rather than being “told” to us: unlike the events of a novel, dramatic and cinematic events are enacted rather than narrated.