What kind of book did Sterne actually write? Or, what kind of book did he think he wrote? What were the generic expectations of his audience he appealed to and tried to fulfil? The standard answer to such questions has, for a long time, always been: a novel.

And, indeed, in certain respects Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey are not unlike the novels of Sterne's contemporaries. Like these, they have fictional characters, whose interactions in a plausible milieu amount to a plot. In Tristram Shandy the story told is that of Tristram, particularly the earliest phases of his life intimately bound up with his family: how he was conceived, born, baptized, put into trousers. It is the story of a series of accidents that befall him and frustrate his father's ambitions for him: how his conception was jeopardized by an unlucky interruptus (TS I.i), how his nose was crushed and his cranium bruised at birth (TS III.xxvii), how he came to be baptized ‘Tristram’ rather than ‘Trismegistus’ (TS IV.iv), how the father's writing of the ‘TRISTRA-paedia’ proved to be counterproductive (TS V.xvi), how he was inadvertently circumcised by the fall of a sash window (TS V.xvii). And later events – the journey through France chased by Death (TS VII), and, also overshadowed by approaching Death, the writing of his ‘Life and Opinions’ (TS I–IX) – seem to continue this pattern of mishaps, failures and traumata. What we seem to have here, then, is the novel as the story of the life of a fictional character, the novel as fictional biography, as with Fielding's History of Tom Jones, A Foundling (1749), albeit with certain modifications such as the focus on the earliest phases of the protagonist 's life and the deflection of the success story into one of arrested or frustrated growth. Or, to apply concepts of the later history of the novel to it: a kind of Entwicklungsroman or Bildungsroman, then, albeit inverted, turned upside down, negativized?

Similarly, one could argue that A Sentimental Journey falls into a recognizable pattern of eighteenth-century fiction: the novel as a fictional travelogue, as the account of a crucial phase in the life of its fictional character, the rite de passage of a journey.