The author makes fun of the "begin from the beginning" novel by giving us the details not of his birth but of his very conception. From the first sentence he establishes his presence, that of a person with lots of opinions. He is the person and the writer who is the natural outcome of the events that he pictures for us from Chapter 1 onward. The ideas of his father have taken firm hold in his mind, and he is the embodiment of things gone wrong. In a way, his book goes wrong from the beginning: instead of giving the reader straightforward facts, he gives minute background and precise explanations about that background. He goes into detail about the details — a propensity that he has obviously inherited from his father.
In addition to establishing his own presence, he shows us without preliminaries his mother and father in bed on that evening. It is as if he has suddenly raised a curtain on the actors who are waiting to begin their performance. At their very first appearance in the book, Mr. and Mrs. Shandy are as vivid and three-dimensional as they are whenever the stage is given over to them, whether for a brief flash or for an extended sequence.
Several important motifs appear in these first chapters. One of them is the Lockean theory of Associationism, introduced in Chapter 1. Two or more ideas become associated in someone's mind; when one of these ideas occurs to him, the other occurs with it automatically. They are inseparably linked. This is a kind of "madness" that periodically springs up in Mrs. Shandy and Uncle Toby, especially in the latter, and naturally they have no control over it. Some of the funniest situations in the book derive from such associated ideas.
