With much restraint, Tristram plays peek-a-boo with the reader in his tale "translated from Slawkenbergius"; the answer to the question, Does the author have a dirty mind? must come from the reader. The tale is suggestive without a doubt, but the humor and the exaggeration are much more important than the symbolism. No one today would feel that he was "sidling up and whispering a nasty story," as Thackeray said of him last century. Bawdy is bawdy, and no one would deny that Tristram has a sizable streak of bawdiness in his makeup. We are not shocked by the facts of life, however, in these decades, and we are more capable of seeing the expression of those facts as part of the character of Tristram. The satire on philosophical and theological pedantry is fully as important to the writer as the nose symbolism, and to read it primarily as a bawdy tale is to read it with at least one eye closed. Further, Tristram is at work here to see what the reader will admit to himself about himself.
Tristram returns to his father on the bed, reminding us again that he has forgotten nothing. The humor of Walter's hand lying across the chamber-pot handle and his chagrin about it put the gravity of the situation into perspective: the crushing of his child's nose isn't so very serious except that Walter thinks it is.
Toby's literalness — one of his dominant traits — again knocks Walter down; the metaphor of man receiving lashes means nothing to Toby. Lashes are lashes, and he knows someone who received a far greater number of them than Walter.
