Donkey

The Donkey recurs in Tristram Shandy as more than a passing beast of burden: it becomes a focus for the narrator’s sympathy, a companion in imagined conversation, and an image through which the book reflects on appetite, literary momentum, and human self-interpretation. Its appearances hold two views together. The animal is a patient creature subject to other people’s decisions and blows; it is also repeatedly recruited into human metaphors, from the narrator’s account of his own writing to his father’s language for the passions.

The animal at the roadside

In Lyons, as the narrator prepares to leave his inn, a poor ass enters the gateway carrying large panniers, uncertain whether to go in or turn back. The narrator says he cannot bear to strike an ass: its patient endurance seems to plead on its own behalf, whether the animal is in town or country, drawing a cart or carrying panniers, free or in bondage. He claims that he can converse with an ass indefinitely, imagining replies from its expression and filling the gaps by considering what an ass might think in the situation. That imagined exchange distinguishes the donkey from parrots, jackdaws, apes, dogs, and cats, with whom he says he cannot sustain a similar dialogue.

The scene makes the animal’s apparent hesitation matter. The donkey turns its head to look up the street and then looks the other way; the narrator interprets this as a fear of choosing wrongly and being beaten. While the conversation continues, the ass chews an artichoke stem, drops it repeatedly, and picks it up again. The narrator remarks on the bitterness of its food and labor, and imagines that it may have no friend to give it a macaroon. He gives it one, but immediately qualifies his own benevolence: amusement at seeing an ass eat a macaroon had played a greater part in the gesture than kindness. Sympathy is present, but the narrator does not present himself as free of self-interest or comic curiosity.

After the animal eats, the narrator tries to lead it through the gate. It is heavily loaded, its legs seem to tremble, and it hangs back; when the narrator pulls its halter, the halter breaks in his hand. The ass looks up at him, and the narrator imagines a plea that it not be beaten, while acknowledging that it may be beaten all the same. Before he can complete his response, another person arrives and strikes the animal, ending the exchange. The scene thus moves from an imagined conversation to an action the narrator cannot prevent. The donkey’s hardship is not resolved by the narrator’s understanding; the abrupt interruption demonstrates the limits of sympathetic intention in the face of another person’s force.

Donkeys in the narrative’s motion

The roadside encounter belongs to a wider pattern in which animals give the book a way to measure the cost of movement. Reflecting on the pace of his first three volumes, the narrator describes himself as riding at a gallop through lanes and turnpikes, with the intention of not harming even the poorest jackass on the road. The intention cannot guarantee the result: his rushing progress risks injuring others as well as himself. He imagines being thrown into the scaffolding of critics and riding through a crowded company of painters, musicians, writers, physicians, lawyers, clergy, politicians, and other figures. Although he insists that he will spare the jackass, the imagined critic accuses him of splashing a bishop, of offending learned doctors, and of treading on a king. The animal’s presence gives the writer’s professed care a concrete measure, while the expanding list of people in his path turns that care into a comic test his haste may fail.

The narrator later looks back on the country traversed across five volumes and recalls groups of jackasses watching the travelers cross a stream and braying as they climbed a hill and passed from sight. He responds by asking who keeps them, whether they are cared for in winter, and whether they are ever groomed. His remarks treat the animals’ noise not as meaningless scenery but as an answer to neglect: their braying makes the world their debtor. This return to the donkey image enlarges the solitary roadside encounter into a collective one. The narrator who once inferred the thoughts of a single laden animal now imagines a whole group of animals whose condition merits attention, even though their voices remain unintelligible in ordinary human terms.

The donkey and human appetite

The animal also enters through the language of bodily appetite. Recalling the hermit Hilarion’s comparison of the body to an ass that must be made to stop kicking, Walter Shandy adopts the image as his preferred way of referring to the passions. He substitutes ass for passions and speaks as though a person must restrain this unruly creature. The comic metaphor turns the body into a beast to be managed, and its repeated use makes Walter’s way of thinking visible: abstract desires become an animal that can be mounted, controlled, or allowed to kick.

The narrator distinguishes this figure from his own Hobby-Horse. His hobby-horse is not vicious: it is a playful mount that carries a person away for an hour, whether the subject is a picture, a tune, or Uncle Toby’s siege. Walter’s ass, by contrast, is represented as concupiscent and dangerous, a creature whose kicking must be checked. The distinction matters because the same animal vocabulary serves opposite purposes. One image casts bodily appetite as a threat requiring discipline; the other helps describe the temporary enthusiasms by which people escape the burdens of life. The donkey is therefore not a stable emblem with one meaning, but a point of contrast through which father and son’s different imaginative habits emerge.

Burden, concealment, and comic use

In the discussion of Slawkenbergius’s account of women examining the contents of panniers, the ass appears as part of a deliberately evasive comic scene. One animal is made to answer that it carries only empty bottles; another claims to be loaded with tripes. The search proceeds from one pannier to the next, and the narrator describes the inspection of the pannier that supposedly carries the sought object while refusing to disclose what that object is. The donkey and its load become instruments of concealment: the scene invites inference, then withholds the conclusion. This use differs sharply from the Lyons encounter, where the panniers mark the animal’s visible burden and the narrator dwells on its difficulty in moving.

Elsewhere, an unfinished account of a bargain over figs and eggs is promised as one of the narrator’s Plain Stories, among the incidents that arise during his journey. The donkey is not the subject of that bargain, but the promise belongs to the same travel narrative in which the roadside ass interrupts departure and becomes a conversation partner. Together, such moments show how easily an incidental animal, a load, or a brief encounter can open a new line of narration. The donkey’s literary importance lies not in a continuous personal history, but in the way its appearances redirect attention: toward a creature’s material vulnerability, toward the narrator’s mixed motives, and toward the book’s habit of turning a road into a succession of stories.