Stream of consciousness
While critics have pointed to various literary precursors, it was not until the 20th century that this technique was fully developed by modernist writers such as Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf.
Stream of consciousness narratives continue to be used in modern prose and the term has been adopted to describe similar techniques in other art forms such as poetry, songwriting and film.
[5][6] Stream of consciousness is a literary method of representing the flow of a character's thoughts and sense impressions "usually in an unpunctuated or disjointed form of interior monologue."
[7] In the following example of stream of consciousness from James Joyce's Ulysses, Molly seeks sleep: a quarter after what an unearthly hour I suppose theyre just getting up in China now combing out their pigtails for the day well soon have the nuns ringing the angelus theyve nobody coming in to spoil their sleep except an odd priest or two for his night office the alarmclock next door at cockshout clattering the brains out of itself let me see if I can doze off 1 2 3 4 5 what kind of flowers are those they invented like the stars the wallpaper in Lombard street was much nicer the apron he gave me was like that something only I only wore it twice better lower this lamp and try again so that I can get up early[8] While the use of the narrative technique of stream of consciousness is usually associated with modernist novelists in the first part of the twentieth century, several precursors have been suggested, including Laurence Sterne's psychological novel Tristram Shandy (1757).
[9][example needed] John Neal in his novel Seventy-Six (1823) also used an early form of this writing style, characterized by long sentences with multiple qualifiers and expressions of anxiety from the narrator.
[12] George R. Clay notes that Leo Tolstoy, "when the occasion requires it ... applies Modernist stream of consciousness technique" in both War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1878).
[13] The short story, "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" (1890), by another American author, Ambrose Bierce, also abandons strict linear time to record the internal consciousness of the protagonist.
[15] Some point to Anton Chekhov's short stories and plays (1881–1904)[16] and Knut Hamsun's Hunger (1890), and Mysteries (1892) as offering glimpses of the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative technique at the end of the nineteenth century.
Earlier in 1906, Joyce, when working on Dubliners, considered adding another story featuring a Jewish advertising canvasser called Leopold Bloom under the title Ulysses.
While Ulysses represents a major example of the use of stream of consciousness, Joyce also uses "authorial description" and Free Indirect Style to register Bloom's inner thoughts.
Furthermore, the novel does not focus solely on interior experiences: "Bloom is constantly shown from all round; from inside as well as out; from a variety of points of view which range from the objective to the subjective".
[28] In his final work Finnegans Wake (1939), Joyce's method of stream of consciousness, literary allusions and free dream associations was pushed to the limit, abandoning all conventions of plot and character construction, and the book is written in a peculiar and obscure English, based mainly on complex multi-level puns.
[30] Prominent uses in the years that followed the publication of James Joyce's Ulysses include Italo Svevo, La coscienza di Zeno (1923),[31] Virginia Woolf in Mrs Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927), and William Faulkner in The Sound and the Fury (1929).
[32] However, Randell Stevenson suggests that "interior monologue, rather than stream of consciousness, is the appropriate term for the style in which [subjective experience] is recorded, both in The Waves and in Woolf's writing generally.
[34] Malcolm Lowry's novel Under the Volcano (1947) resembles Ulysses, "both in its concentration almost entirely within a single day of [its protagonist] Firmin's life ... and in the range of interior monologues and stream of consciousness employed to represent the minds of [the] characters".
Dave Eggers, author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000), according to one reviewer, "talks much as he writes – a forceful stream of consciousness, thoughts sprouting in all directions".
