Narratology in Tristram Shandy

While I thought my examination on what it means to tell a story from a narratorial perspective could be put to rest after Fielding's Shamela, Tristram Shandy seems to be the apex for such a conversation to take place. Whereas other authors we've read seemed, to me, like their wheels were spinning in mud because of the new FORM of the novel (the necessity to be telling a story while also acknowledging that this story must be written down, and therefore told always in the past tense and the possibility of self-editing), Laurence Sterne brilliantly embraces the fact that the narrator, Tristram, is writing down this supposed autobiography and laughingly highlights the ridiculous questions posed by the literary and religious authorities about this new form.
To the question of purpose of writing a novel, Sterne points out that "from the first moment I sat down to write my life for the amusement of the world, and my opinions for its instruction, has a cloud insensibly been gathering over my father." The experience is to be laughed at, whereas his opinions should be taken in as moral and social instruction. How can we understand this, when it is through the experiences of Pamela and Robinson Crusoe that the reader was supposedly learning through novels? Wasn't it the experiences of D'Elmont that were seen to "soften" the readers and make them more vulnerable to sin? For Sterne, it is all of the outside digressions and opinions that he includes (that are also quite amusing) that we should be learning from, and not the experiences that all seem a product of bad luck.
To the question of plausibility, we saw Richardson dance through time and space with Pamela, who would be writing exhaustive letters with a few pages of paper and minutes between interruptions. Sterne plays with this notion several times, giving life to the characters of his story only when his pen is writing directly about them. On several occasions, he claims to leave characters for a specific duration of time so that he can tell a different stories or digressions. "To explain this, I must leave him upon the bed for half an hour-- and my good Uncle Toby in his old fringed chair sitting beside him." About a dozen pages later, Sterne finally returns to them, saying "I have left my father lying across his bed, and my uncle Toby in his old fringed chair, sitting beside him, and promised I would go back to them in half an hour, and five and thirty minutes are laps'd already." Sterne is showing how silly it is to try and make a written story plausible when the nature of writing such a story about a fiction is implausible by nature.
In as much conclusion as a short blog entry on the topic can reach, I think that it is only be showing how silly some of the conventions or expectations of this young genre were. By shedding these conventions through humor, Sterne has freed his writing to be easily the most modern piece of fiction we have read to date.