22. Whether or not this famous ending ought to be understood as but an interruption before the serialized publication of a Book III that Sterne never got round to writing—he died only weeks after the publication of Books I and II in February 1768—is a question that leads nowhere. (See chapter 6, note 32.) The breaking-off in mid-sentence, much like the celebrated opening of the book in mid-conversation on matters never explicitly identified: these bold plays with syntax, metonymical journeys of the “sentimental” mind, will have their echoes in the similarly inconclusive closes of some works by Emanuel Bach, taken up in the next chapter.