Even if Tristram’s poor homunculus

Even if Tristram’s poor homunculus were brought into beingduring the ill-fated coupling, Tristram himself discovers that he must go further back than the conception, to account for himself. But when he does, he confronts a tangle of rapidly proliferating choices: “To sum up all; there are archives at every stage to be look’d into, and rolls, records, documents, and endless genealogies, which justice ever and anon calls him [a man] back to stay the reading of:— In short, there is no end of it” (37). Tristram does not actually supply us with these “endless genealogies,” but we are encouraged to picture a multiplicity of narrative strands moving backwards. For Tristram, as well as the reader, initial information is replaced with new information, as with a strange attractor, and he cannot locate a fixed origin that would account for who and what he is.