Stream of consciousness

Stream of consciousness

Stream of consciousness writing aims to provide a textual equivalent to the stream of a fictional character’s consciousness. It creates the impression that the reader is eavesdropping on the flow of conscious experience in the character’s mind, gaining intimate access to their private “thoughts”. It involves presenting in the form of written text something that is neither entirely verbal nor textual. Stream of consciousness writing was developed in the early decades of the twentieth century when writers became interested in finding ways of laying open for readers’ inspection, in a way impossible in real life, the imagined inner lives of their fictional characters. The challenge was to find ways of writing that would create plausible textual presentations of the imagined thought-streams.

Stream of consciousness writing comes in a variety of stylistic forms, most importantly narrated stream of consciousness and quoted stream of consciousness (“interior monologue”). Narrated stream of consciousness is most often composed of a variety of sentence types including psycho-narration (the narrative report of characters’ psychological states) and free indirect style. Interior monologue is the direct quotation of characters’ silent speech, though not necessarily marked with speech marks. “Interior monologue” is sometimes mistakenly used as a synonym for stream of consciousness writing as such. “Interior monologue” will be discussed below as just one of the forms of stream of consciousness writing, and also in a separate entry in this Encyclopedia.

The term “stream of consciousness” has become common in literary

criticism and has a certain intuitive appeal, since it helps to identify in a rather general way what is was that writers were aiming to achieve in their fiction. However, there is no agreed precise definition of the term and no consensus has been arrived at as to how it is best used. This has caused much muddle and confusion in discussions of modernist technique. Offered above is a deliberately informal and rather vague definition. Rather than attempting to formulate a precise definition, it seems more useful to understand just what it is that stream of consciousness writing tries to achieve and to see why there are so many technical variants of it.

As a novelist Woolf's primary concern was to represent the flow of ordinary experience.

Her emphasis was not on plot or characterization but on a character's consciousness, his thoughts and feelings, which she brilliantly illuminated by the stream of consciousness technique.

Woolf and Joyce are the most gifted and innovative of the stream of consciousness novelists

A giant web of thoughts of several groups of people during the course of a single day.

There is little action/plot, but much movement in time from present to past and back again through the characters memories. The strike of the clock indicates

the real time and brings her back to the present real world.

She did not limit herself to one consciousness, but slipped from mind to mind

A thoroughly well-depicted picture of the heroine, not only from all her own actions and words and thoughts but also from the description of her relations with her family members and friends.

Mrs. Dalloway is shown with all her defects and foibles but there is a sympathy for her throughout the story. After escorting the Prime Minister in her party, “with Sally there and Peter there and Ricard very pleased”, she was aware that “these triumphs…had a hollowness’’.