8) illustrates the actual movement of a door shutting. The door in question is the one to Mr. and Mrs. Shandy's bedroom in the moment of Tristram's conception and the text that follows is, as Tristram says, "only for the curious and inquisitive". The lines flanking this sentence can be seen as a kind of warning for a more chaste and decorous reader to skip the next few paragraphs.
Tristram concludes his grieving account of the death of the parson Yorick by inserting a black space shaped like a tombstone (pg. 25). His epitaph: "Alas, poor Yorick!", which is borrowed from Shakespeare, is framed and looks like an inscription on an actual grave. Sterne plays with the conventions of book publishing and uses this graphic shocker to startle the reader more than words could. Yet we also laugh with awkwardness, because book pages are not supposed to be shrouded in grief. The blackness of the page represents the finality of death better then language could and makes it more tangible and tactile, no longer just an abstract idea put in words.
In the second volume, after Dr Slop crosses himself (pg. 74), Sterne inserts a little cross that represents the actual gesture that was made. This is another example of Sterne's searching for an alternative to language.
We find the first occurrence of double entendre on page 75 when Toby Shandy says that Mrs. Shandy " might not care to let such a Dr Slop come so near her ****." While we cannot be really sure what the asterisks stand for, we are persuaded into a mental exercise to try to imagine. Thus, we become involved in the creation of the book. .
Entire two chapters (Chapter 14 and 15, book three) are devoted to explaining the set of six asterisks on page 126. They stand for a whole process: Dr Slop tries to take his forceps out of the bag as he talks about them (to illustrate his point), but fumbles around in his bag and pulls out the forceps and the squirt together and so ruins the whole effect he intended to make.
