“Let people tell their stories their own way”

“Let people tell their stories their own way” is the narrator’s concise defense of a narrative that refuses to move in a straight line. The phrase answers a reader’s likely objection to chapters that appear out of sequence, and gathers up a larger argument: stories are shaped not only by the events they recount but by the discoveries, associations, interruptions, and judgments that arise in the act of telling.

A history that cannot go straight

The narrator first explains the problem through the image of a historiographer trying to drive a mule from Rome to Loretto without turning aside. Such a writer might predict the hour of arrival, but a spirited historian cannot avoid stopping for views, gathering anecdotes, reconciling accounts, and weaving in stories. The detours are not simply obstacles to a history; they are part of the work of making one. The maxim at the end of the book gives this account of narrative motion its most direct formulation.

Time measured by the telling

The narrator also challenges the idea that a story’s time must match the clock. When Obadiah is sent for Dr. Slop, the narration allows enough reading time for the errand to seem plausible, then acknowledges that only two minutes, thirteen seconds, and three-fifths have passed. It argues that duration is experienced through the succession of ideas, not by an external pendulum alone. In that interval, the book has carried Uncle Toby from Namur across Flanders to England and later taken him and Corporal Trim on a journey of nearly two hundred miles into Yorkshire. The gap between measured time and narrated time makes the reader’s experience of the story part of the argument.

Stories nested within stories

Digression also permits one narrative to open inside another. In the account attributed to Hafen Slawkenbergius, Diego and Fernandez travel toward Spain, while the people of Strasbourg remain consumed by curiosity and eventually return home to a political disaster. The narrator pauses to explain that upheaval through the history of a plan to take Strasbourg, then announces that the explanation will bring the tale to its end. The movement from romance to historical account does not hide the book’s construction: the shift of frame, and the narrator’s decision to explain it, become visible parts of the storytelling.

Inference, memory, and uncertain authority

The book’s digressive method also exposes how accounts are assembled from incomplete evidence. While traveling, the narrator admits knowing almost nothing about Calais, having arrived in the dark and departed before daylight. Yet he claims he could construct a convincing account by drawing one thing from another and combining what he has heard. Elsewhere, he proposes that Yorick’s ancestor held the office of royal jester and identifies him with the Yorick of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, while acknowledging that he has not checked the Danish history that might confirm the idea. These moments make the difference between a fact, an inference, and a plausible performance difficult to ignore; the narrator’s freedom to tell a story his own way does not make every claim equally certain.

The maxim and the blank chapters

Near the end, the narrator returns to two blank chapters and justifies the placement of the eighty-fourth chapter before the seventy-seventh. He says that the apparently empty chapter came about by chance, then asks how readers could expect him to foresee the need to write the later-numbered chapter first. His appeal is not for strict chronological order but for latitude in narration. The maxim, “to let people tell their stories their own way,” turns a specific defense of the book’s structure into a general principle: the order and pace of a story may follow the circumstances of its telling rather than the straight sequence a reader expects.