"Sterne is the great master of ambiguity – this word taken in a far wider sense than is usually done when it is accorded only a sexual signification. The reader who demands to know exactly what Sterne really thinks of a thing, whether he is making a serious or a laughing face, must be given up for lost: for he knows how to encompass both in a single facial expression; he likewise knows how, and even wants to be in the right and in the wrong at the same time, to knot together profundity and farce. His digressions are at the same time continuations and further developments of the story; his aphorisms are at the same time an expression of an attitude of irony towards all sententiousness, his antipathy to seriousness is united with a tendency to be unable to regard anything merely superficially. Thus he produces in the right reader a feeling of uncertainty as to whether one is walking, standing or lying: a feeling, that is, closely related to floating. He, the supplest of authors, communicates something of this suppleness to his reader. Indeed, Sterne unintentionally reverses these roles, and is sometimes as much reader as author; his book resembles a play within a play, an audience observed by another audience. One has to surrender unconditionally to Sterne's caprices – always in the expectation, however, that one will not regret doing so."