essay on stream of consciousness technique

Stream of Consciousness

Stream of Consciousness Definition

What is stream of consciousness? Here’s a quick and simple definition:

Stream of consciousness is a style or technique of writing that tries to capture the natural flow of a character's extended thought process, often by incorporating sensory impressions, incomplete ideas, unusual syntax, and rough grammar.

Some additional key details about stream of consciousness:

• Stream of consciousness writing is associated with the early 20th-century Modernist movement.
• The term “stream of consciousness” originated in psychology before literary critics began using it to describe a narrative style that depicts how people think.
• Stream of consciousness is used primarily in fiction and poetry, but the term has also been used to describe plays and films that attempt to visually represent a character's thoughts.

Understanding Stream of Consciousness

Stream of consciousness writing allows readers to “listen in” on a character's thoughts. The technique often involves the use of language in unconventional ways in an attempt to replicate the complicated pathways that thoughts take as they unfold and move through the mind. In short, it's the use of language to mimic the "streaming" nature of "conscious" thought (thus "stream of consciousness"). Stream of consciousness can be written in the first person as well as the third person .

What Makes Stream of Consciousness Different?

Traditional prose writing is highly linear—one thing or idea follows after another in a more or less logical sequence, as in a line. Stream of consciousness is often  non-linear in a few key ways that define the style: it makes use of unusual syntax and grammar, associative leaps, repetition, and plot structure.

• For instance, in Death in Venice , Thomas Mann uses subtly irregular syntax and grammar to help convey his main character's gradual descent into madness as part of a stream of consciousness passage that begins: "For beauty, Phaedrus, take note! beauty alone is godlike and visible at the same time."
• Additionally, writers of stream of consciousness often use punctuation in unconventional ways (using italics, ellipses, dashes, and line breaks to indicate pauses and shifts in the character's train of thought).
• As an example, characters' thoughts are often presented to the reader in response to sensory impressions—fragmented observations describing what the character sees, hears, smells, feels, tastes, and so on.
• For example, if a character's mind is constantly returning to the scent of a woman's perfume, the reader might conclude that the character is fascinated by or attracted to that woman.
• Some writers shift rapidly between the perspectives of different characters, allowing readers to experience the “stream of consciousness” of multiple people. For example, in one chapter of his novel  Sometimes A Great Notion , Ken Kesey alternates between the thoughts, emotions, and impressions of several characters (including a dog), using italics and different styles of punctuation to indicate which character is thinking each word, phrase, or sentence.
• Some writers may also choose to arrange events out of chronological order, or to give readers details about the past through a character’s memories. In The Sound and the Fury , William Faulkner conveys many important events and details through memories that arise as part of his different characters’ streams of consciousness.

Stream of Consciousness in Literary History

The term “stream of consciousness” originated in the 19th century, when psychologists coined the term to describe the constant flow of subjective thoughts, feelings, memories, and observations that all people experience. Beginning in the early 20th century, however, literary critics began to use “stream of consciousness” to describe a narrative technique pioneered by writers like Dorothy Richardson, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf. Many of these writers were interested in psychology and the "psychological novel," in which writers spend at least as much time describing the characters’ thoughts, ideas, and internal development as they do describing the action of the plot.

Stream of Consciousness vs. Interior Monologue 

Both interior monologue and stream of consciousness involve the presentation of a character's thoughts to the reader. However, there are differences between the two.

• In interior monologue, unlike in stream of consciousness, the character's thoughts are often presented using traditional grammar and syntax, and usually have a clear logical progression from one sentence to the next and one idea to the next. Interior monologue relates a character's thoughts as coherent, fully formed sentences, as if the character is talking to him or herself.
• Stream of consciousness, in contrast, seeks to portray the actual experience of thinking, in all its chaos and distraction. Stream of consciousness is not just an attempt to relay a character's thoughts, but to make the reader experience those thoughts in the same way that the character is thinking them.   

Stream of Consciousness Examples

Stream of consciousness became widespread as a literary technique during the Modernist movement that flourished in the years just before and then after World War I (the early to mid 20th century). Even as Modernism gave way to other movements, it remained as a technique, and is still used not infrequently today. 

Stream of Consciousness in Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf is known for using stream of consciousness in her writing. The novel  Mrs. Dalloway  follows the thoughts, experiences, and memories of several characters on a single day in London. In this passage, the title character, Clarissa Dalloway, watches cars driving by:

She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day. Not that she thought herself clever, or much out of the ordinary. How she had got through life on the few twigs of knowledge Fraulein Daniels gave them she could not think. She knew nothing; no language, no history; she scarcely read a book now, except memoirs in bed; and yet to her it was absolutely absorbing; all this; the cabs passing; and she would not say of Peter, she would not say of herself, I am this, I am that.

Woolf does more than simply say "Mrs. Dalloway watched the taxis and thought about her life." Rather, she lets the reader into the character's thoughts by using long sentences with semicolons to show the slow drift of ideas and the transitions between thoughts. Readers are able to watch as Mrs. Dalloway's mind moves from observations about things she is seeing to reflections on her general attitude towards life, and then moves on to memories from her childhood, then back to the taxi cabs in the street, and finally to Peter, a former romantic interest. This is an excellent example of using associative leaps and sensory impressions to create a stream of consciousness. Woolf manages to convey not only the content but the structure and process of Mrs. Dalloway's thoughts, a fact which is all the more impressive because she does so while writing in the third person.

Stream of Consciousness in Beloved by Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison uses stream of consciousness in passages throughout  Beloved . In this passage, readers hear the voice of a character named Beloved who seems to be the spirit of the murdered infant of another character named Sethe:

I am alone    I want to be the two of us    I want the join    I come out of blue water after the bottoms of my feet swim away from me    I come up    I need to find a place to be    the air is heavy    I am not dead    I am not    there is a house    there is what she whispered to me    I am where she told me    I am not dead    I sit    the sun closes my eyes    when I open them I see the face I lost    Sethe's is the face that left me    Sethe sees me see her and I see the smile    her smiling face is the place for me    it is the face I lost    she is my face smiling at me

Morrison doesn't use proper capitalization or grammar throughout the passage (e.g., "join" is used as a noun). In the place of punctuation, Morrison simply inserts gaps in the text. She also makes use of repetition: when Beloved repeats the words, "I am not dead," she seems to be willing herself to live through a kind of mantra or incantation. Morrison uses run-on sentences and lack of punctuation to show the frantic urgency that Beloved feels when she finds herself alone in death, and to convey her deep desire to be reunited with Sethe—effectively letting readers "listen in" on her thoughts.

Stream of Consciousness in The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock by TS Eliot

Modernist poet TS Eliot uses stream of consciousness techniques in his famous poem, "The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock." 

I grow old ... I grow old ... I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach? I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach. I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me.

The poem generally follows traditional grammar and syntax, but Eliot moves from idea to idea and sentence to sentence using associative thought. For example, when he thinks of walking on the beach, he is reminded of mermaids. And while it's not immediately clear what peaches and mermaids have to do with old age, the passage shows readers something about how the speaker's mind wanders.

Stream of Consciousness in As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

Like Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner is known for his use of stream of consciousness. In this passage from his novel  As I Lay Dying , the character Jewel expresses his frustration that, as his mother is dying, his half-brother is noisily building her a casket just outside her window. 

Because I said If you wouldn't keep on sawing and nailing at it until a man cant sleep even and her hands laying on the quilt like two of them roots dug up and tried to wash and you couldn't get them clean. I can see the fan and Dewey Dell's arm. I said if you'd just let her alone. Sawing and knocking, and keeping the air always moving so fast on her face that when you're tired you cant breathe it, and that goddamn adze going One lick less. One lick less. One lick less until everybody that passes in the road will have to stop and see it and say what a fine carpenter he is. If it had just been me when Cash fell off of that church and if it had just been me when pa laid sick with that load of wood fell on him, it would not be happening with every bastard in the county coming in to stare at her because if there is a God what the hell is He for. It would just be me and her on a high hill and me rolling the rocks down the hill faces and teeth and all by God until she was quiet and not that goddamn adze going One lick less. One lick less and we could be quiet.

The repetition of the phrase "one lick less" helps convey the way Jewel seems to bristle at the repetitive noises made by the saw and the adze outside the window, each noisy "lick" a reminder of his mother's impending death. His sentences also take strange turns and arrive at unexpected places, as when he begins a sentence with a memory of Cash falling off a roof, moves on to lament the constant train of visitors to his mother's room, and ends quite memorably by asking (without the use of a question mark) "because if there is a God what the hell is He for." The passage is incredibly effective at depicting the dizzying range of thoughts and emotions Jewel experiences as he visits the room of his dying mother.

Why Do Writers Use Stream of Consciousness?

Stream of consciousness originated in the late 19th and early 20th century as part of modernist literature. Many of the writers who pioneered the use of stream of consciousness were attempting to create new literary techniques to better represent the human experience—especially in a modern, urban, industrialized world. Today, writers who use stream of consciousness may feel that this technique is more honest or "true to life" than more conventional narrative styles, which force thoughts and ideas into logical and easily digestible sentences.

Writers use stream of consciousness not only to show what a character is thinking, but to actually replicate the experience of thinking, which allows the reader to enter the mind and world of the character more fully. Many people find stream of consciousness writing to be difficult to read, and indeed it does require readers to think in different ways—but this is actually one reason why many writers choose to use the technique. Readers may have to work a bit harder to discern the meaning of a particular sentence, or make inferences about the relationship between seemingly unrelated thoughts in order to fully understand the events of the story, but this is what makes reading stream of consciousness a rich and radically different experience from reading conventional prose.

Other Helpful Stream of Consciousness Resources

• What is the stream of consciousness? Watch this handy video from The School of Life. 
• Who was the first stream of consciousness writer? Many people believe that novelist Dorothy Richardson pioneered this narrative technique.
• Is consciousness really a "stream"? Cognitive scientist Gregory Hickok explores whether the term "stream of consciousness" describes the human thought process accurately. 

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Stream of Consciousness

Stream of consciousness definition.

The literary device stream of consciousness is the continuous flow of thoughts of a person and recorded, thereof, in literature as they occur. In other words, it means to capture a continuous stream of thoughts into words and then scribble them on paper for others to read. This device is used as a noun . The term was first used by a psychologist, William James, in his work published in 1890.

“… it is nothing joined; it flows. A ‘river’ or a ‘stream’ is the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let’s call it the stream of thought, consciousness, or subjective life.” –  William James from The Principles of Psychology .

Another appropriate term for this device is “interior monologue ,” where the individual thought processes of a character , associated with his or her actions, are portrayed in the form of a monologue that addresses the character itself. Therefore, it is different from the “ dramatic monologue ” or “ soliloquy ,” where the speaker addresses the audience or the third person.

Difference Between Stream of Consciousness and Free Writing

Stream of consciousness and free writing seems the same. However, the stream of consciousness is a literary activity in which the character is planned, sketched, and then thoughts are scribbled afterward. In freewriting, it is specific, planned, and topic-centered. It is non- fiction as well as a fictional activity. On the other hand, the stream of consciousness in literature writing is character-specific and objective-oriented. Yet, in one way, both are similar in that both need a free mind to write on some topic which in the case of fiction could be a character while in the case of free writing could be a non-fictional essay .

Difference between Traditional Prose and Stream of Consciousness:

• Syntax : Syntax in traditional prose is correct, has an appropriate structure, and is to the point, while it could be choppy, poor, and even wrong in the case of a stream of consciousness.
• Grammar: There is no sense of grammar in the stream of consciousness writing when it is jumbled up or the mind is in a state of flux. However, it is correct, pure, and exact in traditional prose.
• Association: Traditional prose has some association with the general world while the stream of consciousness is removed from reality and is associated with the mind of the character.
• Repetition : Traditional prose is not repetitious unless it is rhetoric , while the writing in a stream of consciousness could be repetitious to the point of annoyance.
• Plot Structure: The plot is structureless in the case of a stream of consciousness, while in the case of traditional prose, it is well organized.

How to Write Stream of Consciousness?

A writer must keep the following points in mind when writing in a stream of consciousness style .

• It must be character-specific.
• It must sync with the character’s world; profession, relations, work, near and dear ones, and even daily activities .
• It must seem to follow the thoughts of that person.
• It must have some links and pieces of evidence of the thought process.
• It must not have a structure, grammar, or any other formal linguistic evidence unless it is recorded for an educational academic.

Examples of Stream of Consciousness in Literature

The stream of consciousness style of writing is marked by the sudden rise of thoughts and lack of punctuation . The use of this narration style is generally associated with the modern novelist and short story writers of the 20th century. Let us analyze a few examples of the stream of consciousness narrative technique in literature:

Example #1 Ulysses by James Joyce

James Joyce successfully employs the narrative mode in his novel Ulysses , which describes a day in the life of a middle-aged Jew, Mr. Leopold Broom, living in Dublin, Ireland. Read the following excerpt:

“He is young Leopold, as in a retrospective arrangement, a mirror within a mirror (hey, presto!), he beholdeth himself. That young figure of then is seen, precious manly, walking on a nipping morning from the old house in Clambrassil to the high school, his book satchel on him bandolier wise, and in it a goodly hunk of wheaten loaf, a mother’s thought.”

These lines reveal the thoughts of Bloom, as he thinks of the younger Bloom. The self-reflection is achieved by the flow of thoughts that takes him back to his past.

Example #2 Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

“What a lark! What a plunge! For so it always seemed to me when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which I can hear now , I burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as I then was) solemn, feeling as I did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen …”

Another 20th-century writer that followed James Joyce ’s narrative method was Virginia Woolf.   By voicing her internal feelings, Ms. Woolf gives freedom to the characters to travel back and forth in time. Mrs. Dalloway went out to buy flowers for herself, and on the way her thoughts move through the past and present, giving us an insight into the complex nature of her character.

Example #3 The British Museum Is Falling Down by David Lodge

“It partook, he thought, shifting his weight in the saddle, of metempsychosis, the way his humble life fell into moulds prepared by literature. Or was it, he wondered, picking his nose, the result of closely studying the sentence structure of the English novelists? One had resigned oneself to having no private language any more, but one had clung wistfully to the illusion of a personal property of events. A find and fruitless illusion, it seemed, for here, inevitably came the limousine, with its Very Important Personage, or Personages, dimly visible in the interior. The policeman saluted, and the crowd pressed forward, murmuring ‘Philip’, ‘Tony’, ‘Margaret’, ‘Prince Andrew’.”

We notice the use of this technique in David Lodge’s novel The British Museum Is Falling Down. It is a comic novel that imitates the stream of consciousness narrative techniques of writers like Henry James, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf.  We see the imitation of the typical structure of the stream-of-conscious narrative technique of Virginia Woolf. We notice the integration of the outer and inner realities in the passage that is so typical of Virginia Woolf, especially the induction of the reporting clauses “he thought,” and “he wondered,” in the middle of the reported clauses.

Example #4 Notes from The Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky

I have been going on like that for a long time—twenty years. Now I am forty. I used to be in the government service, but am no longer. I was a spiteful official. I was rude and took pleasure in being so. I did not take bribes, you see, so I was bound to find a recompense in that, at least. (A poor jest , but I will not scratch it out. I wrote it thinking it would sound very witty; but now that I have seen myself that I only wanted to show off in a despicable way, I will not scratch it out on purpose!)

This passage can be found at the beginning of the novel. The protagonist of the novel narrates how he has passed more than four decades of his life as it is and has been expelled from the government service. The first-person narration shows his thoughts converted into words. However, the novel was written in Russian and translated into English. Hence, grammar, syntax , and style do not seem to follow the same pattern. However, the monologue occurs in the consciousness of a person.

Example #5  As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

“Well, it isn’t like they cost me anything,” I say. I saved them out and swapped a dozen of them for the sugar and flour. It isn’t like the cakes cost me anything, as Mr Tull himself realises that the eggs I saved were over and beyond what we had engaged to sell, so it was like we had found the eggs or they had been given to us. “She ought to taken those cakes when she same as gave you her word,” Kate says. The Lord can see into the heart. If it is His will that some folks has different ideas of honesty from other folks, it is not my place to question His decree.”

These passages are borrowed from As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner . Cora narrates how she has saved something sugar and floor and that Mr. Tull has made her realize that the eggs are now finished. In the next passage, Kate also adds to things that are coming into their stream of consciousness. This stream of consciousness shows, somewhat, sophisticated thoughts with good wording, good grammar, and good sentence structure.

Example #6 On the Road by Jack Kerouac

During the following week, he confided in Chad King that he absolutely had to learn how to write from him; Chad said I was a writer and he should come to me for advice. Meanwhile Dean had gotten a job in a parking lot, had a fight with Marylou in their Hoboken apartment – God knows why they went there – and she was so mad and so down deep vindictive that she reported to the police some false trumped-up hysterical crazy charge, and Dean had to lam from Hoboken. So he had no place to live. He came right out to Paterson, New Jersey, where I was living with my aunt, and one night while I was studying there was a knock on the door, and there was Dean, bowing, shuffling obsequiously in the dark of the hall, and saying, «Hello, you remember me – Dean Moriarty? I’ve come to ask you to show me how to write.

This passage, though, has good punctuation, and good wording gives the impression that Sal Paradise shows his understanding of different things and how his mind moves from Chad to Dean and vice versa with different places and persons coming in quick succession. This shows a beautiful example of the stream of consciousness.

Function of Stream of Consciousness

Stream of consciousness is a style of writing developed by a group of writers at the beginning of the 20th century. It aimed at expressing in words the flow of characters’ thoughts and feelings in their minds. The technique aspires to give readers the impression of being inside the minds of the characters. Therefore, the internal view of the minds of the characters sheds light on the plot and motivation in the novel.

Synonyms of Stream of Consciousness

Stream of Consciousness has no other word or phrase as an exact meaning. However, the following words can be used interchangeably in general meanings such as apostrophe , association of ideas, chain of thought, interior monologue, monologue, aside , or a soliloquy.

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stream of consciousness

What is stream of consciousness definition, usage, and literary examples, stream of consciousness definition.

Stream of consciousness  (stuhREEM uhv CAHN-shush-niss) is a  narrative  technique that imitates the nonlinear flow of thought. The term originates from 19th-century psychology and later became associated with literature as psychological theories began to influence late 19th- and early 20th-century fiction.

The History of Stream of Consciousness

The term originated in William James’s 1890 book  The Principles of Psychology , in which he compares thought to a stream. At the time, the contemporary belief was that thought worked as an organized chain.

Stream of consciousness, however, was already emerging in literature before James’s text; it appeared in works like Laurence Sterne’s  The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy , Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and Leo Tolstoy’s  War and Peace  and  Anna Karenina . However, the technique wouldn’t come to prominence until it began appearing throughout modern literature as psychology became a subject of interest to early 20th-century writers.

Irish author James Joyce is a notable proponent of this technique, using it in  A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ,  Ulysses , and  Finnegan’s Wake . Other authors of the time, like Virginia Woolf, used stream of consciousness as well. The technique’s relevance progressed into the second half of the 20th century and into the present day. More contemporary works that utilize the technique include Sylvia Plath’s  The Bell Jar , Toni Morrison’s  Beloved , Irvine Welsh’s  Trainspotting , and Brendan Connell’s  The Life of Polycrates and Other Stories for Antiquated Children .

Elements of Stream of Consciousness

Stream of consciousness is characterized by its lack of linearity, which is evident in the technique’s grammar and word order, ambiguous  transitions , repetition, and nonlinear  plot  structure or narration. Since stream of consciousness is meant to depict thought, we experience it every day. Stream of consciousness may appear as follows:

“Look at that kitten sitting on the bin outside. Did I sort through the recycling—crap, I think I threw away my debit card this morning before breakfast I really want a coffee now.”

In the example, thoughts are only loosely connected, change abruptly, and appear as run-on  sentences  to show the unbroken flow between the thoughts.

Why Writers Use Stream of Consciousness

This technique can depict the chaotic and disorganized nature of human thought. As a result, readers witness the complexity of characters’ minds in real time, allowing a clearer view of characters’ emotional and psychological state. This develops the reader’s connection to the character and makes the reader pay close attention to the character’s disjointed thoughts to better understand them.

Stream of Consciousness vs. Internal Monologue

Internal  monologues  and stream of consciousness are similar in concept but distinct in execution. Both involve internal thoughts, but while stream of consciousness renders the messy, fragmented human thought process, internal monologues follow traditional grammatical and structural rules to maintain full. Stream of consciousness thus seeks to let the audience experience what the character is thinking or feeling as it naturally occurs, whereas internal monologues are explicit, coherent statements of what the character is thinking or feeling.

Stream of Consciousness vs. Freewriting

Freewriting is an idea-generating technique that writers use to combat writers’ block. In an effort to spark creativity, writers will jot down anything that comes to mind rather than attempt to coherently organize their thoughts at the beginning of the writing process. Freewriting is similar to stream of consciousness in that the ideas are written down as they come to the writer organically.

However, after freewriting, writers are meant to sort through this material to find useable content that can be turned into a story. Stream of consciousness, on the other hand, is an aspect of a finished story—although the writer has created the effect of nonlinear thought, the precise wording and structure of these thoughts are purposeful.

Writers Known for Stream of Consciousness

Some writers most known for this technique are Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, William Faulkner, and Marcel Proust, though other prominent writers who have used this technique include Sylvia Plath and Jonathan Safran Foer.

Examples of Stream of Consciousness in Literature

1. James Joyce,  Ulysses

In this excerpt, Leopold Bloom’s thoughts transition to his younger self:

He is young Leopold, as in a retrospective arrangement, a mirror within a mirror (hey, presto!), he beholdeth himself. That young figure of then is seen, precious manly, walking on a nipping morning from the old house in Clambrassil to the high school, his book satchel on him bandolier wise, and in it a goodly hunk of wheaten loaf, a mother’s thought.

Joyce accomplishes this  transition  by creating a continuous  narrative  flow of Bloom’s thoughts to his past experiences, bringing the reader along for his mental journey back in time.

2. Toni Morrison,  Beloved

In this excerpt, Beloved is frantically clinging to life:

I am alone   I want to be the two of us   I want the join   I come out of blue water after the bottoms of my feet swim away from me   I come up   I need to find a place to be   the air is heavy   I am not dead   I am not   there is a house   there is what she whispered to me   I am where she told me   I am not dead   I sit   the sun closes my eyes   when I open them I see the face I lost   Sethe’s is the face that left me   Sethe sees me see her and I see the smile   her smiling face is the place for me   it is the face I lost   she is my face smiling at me

Beloved’s fear of death and desire to be with Sethe are communicated through disjointed, unpunctuated, and repetitive thoughts. The use of stream of consciousness underscores her panic and urgent desire to see Sethe.

3. T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

In this excerpt, Eliot’s speaker jumps from one thought to the next as he considers mortality:

I grow old … I grow old …

I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. Shall I part my hair behind?  Do I dare to eat a peach?

I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me.

As the speaker struggles to understand death, he attempts to communicate his state of mind, and his flow of thoughts jump from one subject to the next.

Further Resources on Stream of Consciousness

Oregon State University has a concise  YouTube video  on the topic.

The School of Life has also created a  video  on the topic with additional examples.

Related Terms

• Freewriting
• Internal Monologue
• Perspective

• The Sound and the Fury

William Faulkner

• Literature Notes
• Faulkner's Style and Stream-of-Consciousness
• Book Summary
• About The Sound and the Fury
• Character List
• Summary and Analysis
• The Benjy Section
• The Quentin Section
• Jason's Section
• Easter Sunday
• Character Analysis
• Mr. Jason Compson III
• Mrs. Caroline Compson
• Quentin Compson
• Jason Compson
• William Faulkner Biography
• Critical Essays
• Title of The Sound and the Fury
• Structure of The Sound and the Fury
• Meaning through Motif
• Essay Questions
• Cite this Literature Note

Critical Essays Faulkner's Style and Stream-of-Consciousness

The term "stream-of-consciousness" refers to a technique of narration. Prior to the twentieth century, an author would simply tell the reader what one of the characters was thinking. Stream-of-consciousness is a technique whereby the author writes as though inside the minds of the characters. Since the ordinary person's mind jumps from one event to another, stream-of-consciousness tries to capture this phenomenon. Thus, in the Benjy section, everything is presented through the apparently unorganized succession of images, and, in the Quentin section, everything is presented through random ideas connected by association. We have writing that jumps from one thought to another without any indication of a change. This technique is radically different from the older form of presenting the narrative through logical sequence and argument.

This technique reflects the twentieth-century development, research, and interest in the psychology of "free association." As a technique, stream-of-consciousness was first used in English by James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. But Faulkner's use of this technique in The Sound and the Fury is probably the most successful and outstanding use that we have yet had.

Even while using this technique, Faulkner varies it with each section. For example, in the Benjy section, Faulkner's style is basically simple, which does not mean that the section is simple, but that each individual sentence is a rather simple and uncomplicated one. There are no difficult words because the vocabulary of Benjy would naturally be simple. Since his mind does not function logically, Faulkner records the thinking in terms of basic images. Thus, when Benjy sees the gate or the barn, he remembers another event that happened at the gate or the barn. Likewise, his thought can be interrupted halfway through a thought; sometimes he can return to it and sometimes the thought is lost forever. Stylistically, Faulkner has created a powerful tour de force by suggesting the functioning of Benjy's mind, but he has still brought enough order to that mind so that the reader can follow his thoughts.

Whereas Faulkner's style is relatively noncomplex in presenting the simple mind of Benjy, when he turns to the complex and intricate mind of Quentin, his style changes drastically. In Quentin's section, we find long, complex, and difficult ideas. Quentin is trying to solve complicated moral issues; therefore, his section is more complicated. Likewise, Quentin's mind is a more advanced mind and his thoughts jump from one idea to another very quickly. The technique that Faulkner uses to give order to Quentin's section is that of presenting this section on the day when Quentin is about to commit suicide. Therefore, Quentin's mind is concerned only with one or two ideas — the dishonor of his sister Caddy and the nihilistic philosophy of his father.

Whenever Quentin's mind jumps back to some thought of the past, it is to these two subjects. If Quentin had been concerned with other things, his section would be far more complicated. And as we reread the section, we realize that every scene returns to these events. For example, Quentin is riding with Gerald when he remembers his embarrassing talk with Dalton Ames on the bridge, and suddenly he asks if Gerald has a sister. The fight that occurs is a result of Quentin relating his past question and the consequent fight with Dalton to the present situation involving Gerald.

The style changes drastically again with Jason's section. Jason's mind is involved, but it is the mind of a monomaniac. He is concerned only with getting money and punishing others. Thus, his section flows along at a rapid pace because he is not troubled with the intricacies of life, and he is not concerned with images or impressions. The order and simplicity of his section is a result of his single-minded viciousness.

The final section offers us the first straightforward narrative. Here Faulkner adjusts his style to fit the character of Dilsey. We have a quiet, dignified style; the reader is presented the events of the fourth section without any comment or without any complicated sentence structure. And in the light of the other three sections narrated by a Compson, this final section has a strong sense of control and order.

Faulkner's virtuosity, therefore, is seen in the way he adjusts his style to fit the mind of each individual narrator. From Benjy's impressions and images to Quentin's obsessed concern with a single idea to Jason's monomania, Faulkner's style shifts in order to lend additional support to his subject matter.

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Home › British Literature › Stream of Consciousness

Stream of Consciousness

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on October 7, 2022

The coining of this term has generally been credited to the American psychologist William James, older brother of novelist Henry James. It was originally used by psychologists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to describe the personal awareness of one’s mental processes. In a chapter of The Principles of Psychology titled “The Stream of Thought,” James provides a phenomenological description of this sensing of consciousness:

Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as “chain” or “train” do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows. A “river” or a “stream” are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life. (239; italics in the original).

It is helpful at the outset to distinguish stream of consciousness from free association. Stream of consciousness, from a psychological perspective, describes metaphorically the phenomena—that continuous and contiguous fl ow of sensations, impressions, images, memories, and thoughts—experienced by each person, at all levels of consciousness, that are generally associated with each person’s subjectivity, or sense of self. Free association, in contrast, is a process in which apparently random data collected from a subject allow connections to be made from the unconscious, subconscious, and preconscious to the conscious mind of that subject. Translated and mapped to the space of narrative literatures, free association can be one element in the means used to signify the stream of consciousness.

William James / Wikimedia

As a literary term, stream of consciousness appears in the early 20th century at the intersection of three apparently disparate projects: the developing science of psychology (e.g., investigations of the forms and manifestations of consciousness, as elaborated by Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, James, and others), the continuing speculations of Western philosophy as to the nature of being (e.g., investigations of consciousness in time by Henri Bergson), and reactionary forces in the arts that were turning away from realism in the late 19th century in favor of exploring a personal, self-conscious subjectivity. The psychological term was appropriated to describe a particular style of novel or technique of characterization that was prevalent in some fictional works, which relied on the mimetic representation of the mind of a character and which dramatized the full range of the character’s consciousness by direct and apparently unmediated quotation of such mental processes as memories, thoughts, impressions, and sensations. Stream of consciousness, constituting as it did the ground of self-awareness, was consequently extended to describe narratives and narrative strategies in which the overt presence of the author/narrator was suppressed in favor of presenting the story exclusively through the thought of one or more of the characters in the story. Examples of stream of consciousness techniques can arguably be found in narratives written during the last several centuries, including works by Rhoda Broughton and Lucy Clifford in the 19th century. Generally speaking, however, the British writers who are most often cited as exemplars of the stream of consciousness technique are associated with the high modern period of the early 20th century: Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, May Sinclair, and Dorothy Richardson.

Bearing in mind the origin of the term, it is easy to see why some Anglo-American literary critics and theorists have subsumed all textual manifestations of the mental activity of characters in a narrative under the overarching term stream of consciousness. While convenient, this tendency belies the rich range and depth of narrative methods for representing a character’s consciousness, often best described by the terms originally naming them. Consider, for example, the interior monologue, in which, a running monologue—similar to those we all experience inside our own minds but that we cannot experience in the minds of others except in fictional narrative—is textually rendered as the unmediated but articulated, logical thoughts of a fictional character. That this monologue is unmediated, presented to the reader without either authorial or narratorial intervention or the common textual signs associated with narrative speech (e.g., quotation marks or attributive verbs), is crucial to establishing in the reader the sense of access to the consciousness of the character. That it is logical and respects grammatical form and syntax, as opposed to appearing as a random collection of disconnected thoughts and images, distinguishes it from another textual rendering of the stream of consciousness, that of sensory impression.

Sensory impression, as a mode of representing the stream of consciousness, occurs as simple lists of a character’s sensations or impressions, sometimes with ellipses separating them. These unconscious or preconscious sensory impressions represent the inarticulable thoughts, the imaginings of a character that are not experienced as words. To prevent the free associations that stem from such sensory impressions from running away with and destroying the flow and integrity of the narrative, a story must somehow be anchored within the stream of consciousness. One method is a recurring motif or theme. The motif appears on the surface of a character’s thoughts and then disappears among the flow of memories, sensations, and impressions it initiates only to resurface some time later, perhaps in a different form, to pull the story back up into the consciousness of both the character and the reader. Consider the example of Virginia Woolf’s short story “The Mark on the Wall.” The story begins as a meditation, which could easily be read as a spoken monologue, on a series of recollected events but quickly turns, through the motif of a mark seen by the narrator over a mantlepiece on the wall, to a nearly random stream of loosely connected memories and impressions. As the story progresses, the mark and speculations as to its nature and origin appear and disappear as a thread running in and out, binding the loose folds of the narrator’s recollections to one another. The narrator’s stream of consciousness ranges widely over time and space, whereas the narrator quite clearly remains bound to a particular place and time, anchored—seemingly—by the mark on the wall.

While not generally considered a textual manifestation of stream of consciousness in the conventional sense—in part because it is associated with third-person rather than first-person narration—another method of representing the consciousness of characters is free indirect discourse, or reported or experienced speech. Consider the following, from the ending paragraphs of Joyce’s short story “The Dead”:

He wondered at his riot of emotions an hour before. From what had it proceeded? From his aunt’s supper, from his own foolish speech, from the wine and dancing, the merry-making when saying good-night in the hall, the pleasure of the walk along the river in the snow. Poor Aunt Julia! She, too, would soon be a shade with the shade of Patrick Morkan and his horse. (222)

The first sentence is clearly the narrator telling what the character, Gabriel, is thinking; but with the second sentence comes a transition in the form of a series of sensory impressions that moves the reader to Gabriel’s own conscious thoughts. In the end, it is not the narrator who thinks, “Poor Aunt Julia!”

BIBLIOGRAPHY Cohn, Dorrit. Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978. Bowling, Lawrence Edward. “What Is the Stream of Consciousness Technique?” PMLA 65, no. 4 (1950): 333–345. James, William. The Principles of Psychology. 1890. New York: Dover Publications, 1950. Joyce, James. Dubliners. 1916. New York: The Viking Press, 1967. Woolf, Virginia. The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf. 2nd ed. New York: Harcourt, 1989.

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Stream of Consciousness Writing

Writing How the Mind Works

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Stream of consciousness is a  narrative technique that gives the impression of a mind at work, jumping from one observation, sensation, or reflection to the next seamlessly and often without conventional  transitions .

Although stream of consciousness is commonly associated with the work of novelists including James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner, the method has also been used effectively by writers of creative nonfiction  and is often referred to as freewriting.

The metaphor of the stream of consciousness was coined by American philosopher and psychologist William James in "The Principles of Psychology" in 1890 and has been perpetuated to this day in the modern literature and psychology fields.

Urgency and Presence in Stream of Consciousness

Often used by creative writing teachers as a means to get the "creative juices flowing" for their students at the beginning of classes, a stream of consciousness writing exercises often ground writers in the presentness, the importance of a given subject or discourse.

In creative fiction, a stream of consciousness may be used by a narrator to convey the thoughts or feelings going on in the head of a character, a writer's trick to convince the audience of the authenticity of thoughts he or she is attempting to write into the story. These internal monologues of sorts read and transfer thought more organically to the audience, providing a direct look into the "inner workings" of a character's mental landscape.

The characteristic lack of punctuation and transitions only furthers this idea of a free-flowing prose wherein the reader and speaker alike jump from one topic to the next, much like a person would when daydreaming about a given topic—one might start with talking about fantasy films but end up discussing the finer points of medieval costuming, for instance, seamlessly and without transition.

A Notable Example in Tom Wolfe's Nonfiction Work

Stream of consciousness writing isn't only for fictional works—Tom Wolfe's memoir " Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" is packed full of beautiful, eloquent stream of consciousness which provides insight into the protagonists' journey and story. Take this excerpt for example: 

"—Kesey has Cornel Wilde Running Jacket ready hanging on the wall, a jungle-jim corduroy jacket stashed with fishing line, a knife, money, DDT, tablet, ball-points, flashlight, and grass. Has it timed by test runs that he can be out the window, down through a hole in the roof below, down a drain pipe, over a wall and into thickest jungle in 45 seconds—well, only 35 seconds left, but head start is all that’s needed, with the element of surprise. Besides, it's so fascinating to be here in subastral projection with the cool rushing dex, synched into  their  minds and his own, in all its surges and tributaries and convolutions, turning it this way and that and rationalizing the situation for the 100th time in split seconds, such as: If they have that many men already here, the phony telephone men, the cops in the tan car, the cops in the Volkswagen, what are they waiting for? why haven't they crashed right in through the rotten doors of this Rat building--"

In "The Mythopoeic Reality: The Postwar American Nonfiction Novel," Mas'ud Zavarzadeh explains Wolfe's above use of stream of consciousness as the dominating narrative choice for this section of the nonfiction novel, saying "the technical rationale for the use of such narrational devices in the nonfiction novel is the treatment of the subjectivity of the situation or person portrayed, as distinguished from the projected subjectivity (empathy) of the fictive novelist."

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Stream of Consciousness: A Literary Device

Stream of Consciousness is a literary narrative technique that aims to depict the continuous, unfiltered flow of thoughts, feelings, and perceptions within a character’s mind in real-time.

Etymology of Stream of Consciousness

Table of Contents

The term “Stream of Consciousness” in the context of literary technique originated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, primarily associated with the works of authors such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. The etymology of this phrase is rooted in psychology and philosophy.

It reflects the idea of capturing the continuous flow of thoughts, feelings, and perceptions within an individual’s mind as they occur, much like a stream that flows uninterrupted. Stream of consciousness as a narrative style seeks to delve deep into the inner workings of characters’ minds, offering readers a direct, unfiltered glimpse into their inner thoughts and experiences.

This literary technique serves to explore the complexities of human consciousness and the subjective nature of perception, allowing for a deeper understanding of characters’ motivations and the intricacies of their inner worlds.

Meaning of Stream of Consciousness

Definition of stream of consciousness.

It often eschews traditional punctuation and structure to capture the fluidity and subjectivity of human consciousness. This technique provides readers with an intimate and immersive insight into a character’s inner thoughts and experiences, emphasizing the complexity and uniqueness of individual mental landscapes.

Common Features of and Stream of Consciousness

• Interior Monologue : Characters’ inner thoughts and mental processes are depicted in a continuous, unbroken flow, often mirroring the way thoughts naturally occur in the mind.
• Real-Time Rendering : The narrative seeks to capture thoughts as they happen, providing readers with an immediate and immersive experience of the character’s consciousness.
• Subjectivity : The narrative highlights the highly subjective nature of human perception, emphasizing that each character’s thoughts and experiences are unique and influenced by personal history and emotions.
• Fragmentation : Traditional punctuation and linear structure are frequently disregarded, leading to fragmented and nonlinear storytelling that reflects the chaotic and interconnected nature of thought.
• Multiple Perspectives : Different characters’ streams of consciousness may be presented within the same work, allowing readers to explore the inner worlds of various characters.
• Psychological Depth : Authors use this technique to delve deeply into characters’ psyches, often revealing their motivations, fears, desires, and subconscious associations.
• Temporal Fluidity : Time can be fluid in stream of consciousness narratives, with past, present, and future thoughts intermingling to reflect the non-linear nature of memory and perception.
• Immediate Sensations : The style can capture immediate sensory experiences, including sensory perceptions such as sights, sounds, smells, and tactile sensations.
• Introspection : Characters engage in introspection and self-reflection, providing insight into their self-awareness and inner conflicts.
• Complexity and Ambiguity : The narrative style may add layers of complexity and ambiguity, encouraging readers to engage actively with the text and interpret the meaning behind fragmented thoughts.
• Modernist Literary Movement : Stream of consciousness is closely associated with the modernist literary movement of the early 20th century, challenging conventional narrative structures and exploring the complexities of human consciousness.

Types of Stream of Consciousness

Common examples of stream of consciousness.

• Daydreaming : When you let your mind wander without a specific focus, you may experience a stream of consciousness. Your thoughts may flow from one idea to another, often without a clear structure or goal.
• Mindful Meditation : During mindfulness or meditation practices, you may observe your thoughts as they arise without actively trying to control or direct them. This can lead to a stream of consciousness where thoughts come and go naturally.
• Conversations : In everyday conversations, people often express their thoughts and feelings as they occur in real-time. When engaged in a spontaneous and unscripted conversation, you may notice a continuous flow of thoughts and responses.
• Journaling : When you write in a journal, especially in a freeform and unstructured way, you may find that your thoughts flow onto the page without much premeditation. This can result in a stream-of-consciousness writing style.
• Problem Solving : When you’re trying to solve a complex problem or make a decision, your thoughts may flow from one consideration to another, exploring various possibilities and weighing pros and cons.
• Creativity and Artistic Expression : Artists, writers, and musicians often tap into stream of consciousness to generate ideas and inspiration. They may let their thoughts flow freely, allowing unexpected connections to emerge.
• Reflection and Self-Analysis : During moments of self-reflection or self-analysis, you may experience a stream of consciousness as you examine your emotions, past experiences, and future aspirations.
• Dreams : While dreaming, your mind often follows a stream of consciousness, creating scenarios and narratives that can be vivid and unpredictable.
• Reading and Watching : When you read a book or watch a movie, you may find yourself mentally reacting to the content in real-time, forming opinions, making predictions, and experiencing emotional responses as the story unfolds.
• Driving or Commuting : During solitary activities like driving or commuting, your mind may wander, leading to a stream of consciousness where you reflect on various aspects of your life or engage in creative thinking.

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An Analysis of Stream-of-Consciousness Technique in To the Lighthouse

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William James on the Stream of Consciousness (1890)

William James, The Principles of Psychology (London: Macmillan & Co., 1890).

First published as a standalone volume on February 2, 1922, James Joyce’s Ulysses turns one hundred this week. Even if you have never immersed yourself in the modern reimagining of Homer’s seafaring epic, a related phrase may have drifted across your awareness: the name for a narrative technique employed by Joyce, Djuna Barnes, Jean Toomer, Virginia Woolf, and myriad other writers that rub shoulders within the ever-bulging periodic and aesthetic borders of modernist literature: stream of consciousness .

Scholars believe “stream of consciousness” was first used as a description of literary style by the British writer May Sinclair, during a review of Dorothy Richardson’s novels for The Egoist in 1918. Eschewing the “philosophical cant of the nineteenth century” — mannered depictions of the world that passed for “realism” — May prefers the mess of the mind. “Reality is thick and deep, too thick and too deep, and at the same time too fluid to be cut with any convenient carving-knife.” To capture this fluidity, the novelist must “plunge in”, which Richardson does in her monumental thirteen-novel Pilgrimage sequence. “In this series there is no drama, no situation, no set scene. Nothing happens. It is just life going on and going. It is Miriam Henderson’s stream of consciousness going on and on”, writes May. Although James Wood and others have argued that there is nothing uniquely modernist about representing “the movement of the mind” upon the page, the psychological theory of mind that informs May’s review can be traced to a chapter in William James’ The Principles of Psychology (1890).

Harvard professor, physician, investigator of psychic communication, “father of American psychology”, and the brother of novelist Henry James, William James begins “The Stream of Thought” by acknowledging that any psychological vocabulary will be rough-hewn when it comes to the fine-cut facets of mental phenomena, comparing what follows to “a painter’s first charcoal sketch upon his canvas, in which no niceties appear”. But the psychologist is being modest, for he immediately launches into a polished discussion of “anesthetic somnambulists”, subconscious personages, and the possibility of thoughts existing without a thinker. This is all a preface for the larger concept: that our minds seem to ebb and flow with ideas, while emotions behave almost tidally, rising and falling in relation to intangible forces, as if a moon presses gravitationally upon our psychic seas.

James was not the first to analogize the mind as a river — Alexander Bain had used the phrase “stream of consciousness” in 1855 and the Buddhist concept of “mindstream” ( citta-santāna ), characterizes selfhood in a similar way. In The Principles of Psychology , “the stream of thought” becomes a carefully chosen image for the flux of subjectivity: how ideas, feelings, and sensations, both present and past, cohere into the experience of a continuous self, that ever-present “I”, which meanders through the mind from childhood until our deaths and possibly beyond. Invoking Heraclitus by name, James repurposes his idea — that a person can never wade into the same river twice: “ no state once gone can recur and be identical with what it was before. . . . In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life .” Beneath this stream, to continue his fluvial metaphor, sits the silt and pebbled bed of the unconscious, voluntary and involuntary memories, and even alternative persona. In contrast to the theories of Pierre Janet, Jean-Martin Charcot, and other early psychologists who practiced at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris (and cultivated damaging theories regarding female hysteria), James thought “the fact that the mind contains multiple streams of consciousness which at times rise to the surface was not something to be feared”, writes Alicia Puglionesi . In other words, the self contains multitudes and always has.

If consciousness is a stream, what are the banks and channels that guide its course? James alighted on a concern that would preoccupy spelunkers of cognition in the decades to follow: the deadening effects of habit, the diminishing returns of repetitive pleasures, whether gustatorial, aesthetic, or spiritual. As if trying to refresh the perception of his reader’s glazed eyes, James lapses literary when addressing the topic, assuming the voice of a world-weary male:

From one year to another we see things in new lights. What was unreal has grown real, and what was exciting is insipid. The friends we used to care the world for are shrunken to shadows. . . once so divine, the stars, the wood, and the waters, how now so dull and common! the young girls that brought an aura of infinity, at present hardly distinguishable existences; the pictures so empty; and as for the books, what *was* there to find so mysteriously significant in Goethe, or in John Mill so full of weight?

The turn of the century saw a proliferation of treatises on the dulling effects of routine. Works such as Walter Pater’s The Renaissance (1873) Albert Lemoine’s L’Habitude et L’Instinct (1875), Georg Simmel’s “ The Metropolis in Mental Life ”(1903), and Viktor Shklovsky’s “ Art as Technique ” (1917) evidence the widespread concern — voiced by philosophers, art historians, literary theorists, sociologists, and novelists across a wealth of languages — about the way increasingly mechanized, mediated, and urbanized societies downregulate stimulus response. While Pater speculated that “our failure is to form habits”, Samuel Beckett would concede in a 1930 essay on Marcel Proust that the stream of consciousness only appears consistent due to the regulatory effects of habitual action: “Habit then is the generic term for the countless treaties between the countless subjects that constitute the individual and their countless correlative objects.” Though influenced by Henri Bergson, Beckett’s idea may not have been possible without the work of William James, who dedicated a 1914 essay to the topic, and meditated on habit and the continuity of selfhood at length in “The Stream of Thought”.

“Annihilate a mind at any instant, cut its thought through whilst yet uncompleted, and examine the object present to the cross-section thus suddenly made; you will find, not the bald word in process of utterance, but that word suffused with the whole idea”. Figure from William James, The Principles of Psychology (1890) — Source .

Art has long offered an antidote to what James describes as the decay of excitement into insipidity. In Percy Shelley’s famous dictum : “Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar”. From Stephen Hero , his early draft of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man , to Finnegans Wake , written in a stream of unconsciousness — “an imitation of the dream-state” — Joyce maintained a cryptic interest in the ability of literary language to prompt epiphany , defined, by his character Stephen, as: “a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture of in a memorable phrase in the mind itself. . . . it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments.” In Ulysses , the “stream of consciousness” technique not only faithfully represents the mind by violating the supposed objectivity of nineteenth-century realism, as May Sinclair described, but leaves its reader, perhaps, with an enhanced consciousness of their own cognition.

Take, for instance, a scene in the “ Lestrygonians ” episode that occurs along the waters, when the adman Leopold Bloom crosses Dublin’s O’Connell Bridge over the River Liffey. We begin in the third person, as a narrator describes how Bloom scans the river, finding a clever advertisement — for a London clothier, selling trousers in its Dublin outlet at eleven shillings a pair — mounted on a docked and rocking rowboat:

His eyes sought answer from the river and saw a rowboat rock at anchor on the treacly swells lazily its plastered board.          Kino’s          11/-          Trousers Good idea that. Wonder if he pays rent to the corporation. How can you own water really? It’s always flowing in a stream, never the same, which in the stream of life we trace. Because life is a stream.

The ad is not summarized or offset by quotation marks: we see it as Bloom does. And suddenly, without marked transition, we are inside his mind, surfing the stream of consciousness as Bloom reflects, like Heraclitus and James before him, on the everchanging fluidity of inner and outer life. It’s a brilliant passage, for — as aqueous advertising seeps into free-flowing thought — Bloom himself becomes an advertisement for Joyce’s style, how the author approximates the treacly swells of cognition, plunging us deep into the thick river of reality.

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The Use of Stream-of-Consciousness Technique in the Dead and in the Heart of Darkness Essay

One of the most peculiar characteristics of now famous literary works, published throughout the 20 th century’s early phase, is that the themes and motifs, contained in these works, reflect the essence of what was a predominant socio-philosophical discourse of the time.

In its turn, this discourse used to be largely concerned with the fact that, throughout the mentioned historical period, the newly emerged science of psychology started to people with an in-depth insight into the workings of their psyche (Kessen and Cahan 640).

Consequently, this was causing intellectually advanced individuals to assume that the particulars of how they assess the surrounding reality cannot be discussed outside of what happened to be their socially suppressed unconscious anxieties.

This, of course, created objective preconditions for many writers, to decide in favor of taking a practical advantage of the so-called ‘stream-of-consciousness’ narrative technique, when readers are being exposed to the flow of seemingly random semi-conscious thoughts, on the part of the featured characters – hence, gaining a better understanding of the motivations behind the concerned characters’ behavior.

In my paper, I will discuss the particulars of this technique’s deployment in James Joyce’s short story The Death and in Josef Conrad’s novel The Heart of Darkness , while elaborating on how it accentuates the discursive significance of both literary masterpieces.

Nowadays, it became a commonplace practice among literary critics to refer to Joyce’s The Death in terms of a ‘modernist story’. One of the reasons for this is that, unlike what it is being usually the case in ‘Victorian stories’, the manner in which the story’s main character Gabriel addresses life-challenges, has very little to do with his ability to rationalize the emanations of the reality around him.

Unlike Victorian characters, Gabriel does not strive to adjust his behavior to be consistent with the provisions of the conventional morality, but rather allows his highly subjective perception of the world around him to affect the manner in which he behaves.

The validity of this suggestion can be well illustrated in regards to the scene, where overwhelmed with the sensation of an emotional discomfort towards the idea that there can be a good sense in exploring one’s ‘cultural roots’, Gabriel simply tells Miss Ivors that he hates the country in which he happened to live.

Nevertheless, the way in which Gabriel acts makes a perfectly good logic. This is because, throughout the story’s entirety, Gabriel is being represented as an individual that never ceases to remain in a close touch with his irrational emotions. In their turn, these emotions appear to derive out of the character’s memories of the past, which of course justifies the author’s deployment of stream-of-consciousness technique, as yet additional instrument of ensuring the perceptual plausibility of the plot.

For example, while contemplating upon what may have contributed towards his sensation of an existential inadequateness, Gabriel cannot help recalling the past-images of himself: “He (Gabriel) saw himself as a ludicrous figure, acting as a pennyboy for his aunts, a nervous, well-meaning sentimentalist, orating to vulgarians and idealising his own clownish lusts, the pitiable fatuous fellow he had caught a glimpse of in the mirror” (Joyce 20).

Even though that, formally speaking, exposing readers to Gabriel’s self-reflective images may be considered as such that does not make much of a sense, since there is no any way for the latter to relate to these images cognitively/emotionally, this is far from being the actual case.

The reason for this is apparent – while provided with the opportunity to catch the semantically unrelated glimpses of Gabriel, throughout his life’s different phases, readers are able to gain a better understanding of the main character’s state of mind.

There is even more to it – the deployment of stream-of-consciousness technique in The Dead , was also meant to encourage readers to consider the possibility that, contrary to the philosophical conventions of the 19 th century, the particulars of how people indulge in a rational reasoning are predetermined by the working of their unconscious.

Therefore, it will not be much of an exaggeration to suggest that, apart from adding to the plot’s plausibility, the application of stream-of-consciousness technique in the story also intended to serve the purpose of enlightening readers on how one’s mind actually works. That is, after having formulated a particular conscious thought, people unconsciously seek to confirm this thought’s soundness, in regards to what used to be the emotionally relevant circumstances, at the time of its formulation.

This explains their tendency to assess the validity of abstract ideas through the perceptually subjective lenses of their past-memories/experiences: “He (Gabriel) wondered at his riot of emotions of an hour before. From what had it proceeded? From his aunt’s supper, from his own foolish speech, from the wine and dancing, the merry-making when saying good night in the hall, the pleasure of the walk along the river in the snow” (22).

As the above-quote suggests, it is specifically the sphere of their irrational unconscious, in which people’s rational thoughts actually ‘reside’. Even though that, as of today, the validity of this suggestion is being commonly deemed self-evident, at the time when Joyce was working on his story, the idea that one’s behavior sublimates his or her essentially unconscious angsts, was considered truly innovative.

This explains the ‘modernist’ status of the story in question – its themes and motifs, made even more recognizable by the author’s deployment of stream-of-consciousness technique; do extrapolate Joyce’s anticipation of modernity. Therefore, there is nothing odd about the fact that even today, The Death continues to be referred to, as such that constitutes a particularly high literary value.

Whereas, in The Death , the utilization of stream-of consciousness technique serves primarily the function of emphasizing the plot’s plausibility, the deployment of the same technique in Conrad’s novel The Heart of Darkness appears to serve the function ensuring the structural integrity of the narration, concerned with Marlow’s quest in the primeval jungles of Africa.

After all, Marlow’s voyage into the ‘heart of darkness’ has a strongly defined metaphorical significance, which in turn allows us to discuss Conrad’s novel, as such that it is being subliminally reflective of one’s semi-conscious voyage into the dark depths of his or her unconscious psyche.

Therefore, it is fully explainable why the motif of darkness appears to be present in many of Marlow’s lapses into ‘consciousness-streaming’, such as the following one: “I saw him extend his short flipper of an arm for a gesture that took in the forest, the creek, the mud, the river – seemed to beckon with a dishonoring flourish before the sunlit face of the land a treacherous appeal to the lurking death, to the hidden evil, to the profound darkness of its heart” (Conrad 10).

Apparently, one of the reasons why Conrad used the stream-of-consciousness technique repeatedly, throughout the novel’s entirety, is that it helped him to advance the idea that one’s prolonged self-reflexing is being potentially capable of driving the concerned individual towards insanity.

This the reason why, while exposed to Marlow’s ‘day dreaming’, readers often experience a hard time, while trying to separate the de facto reality, which surrounds the character, from the one he had already been faced with (or reflected upon) in the past.

The following quotation is particularly illustrative of this statement’s legitimacy: “The broadening waters flowed through a mob of wooded islands; you lost your way on that river as you would in a desert, and butted all day long against shoals, trying to find the channel, till you thought yourself bewitched and cut off for ever from everything you had known once -somewhere – far away – in another existence perhaps” (11).

After all, it does not represent much of a secret to psychiatrists, that mentally deranged individuals do seem to perceive the objective reality, as such that has the mind of its own – hence, their tendency to seek a ‘hidden meaning’ in just about anything they happened to focus their attention upon.

Moreover, while self-reflecting, these individuals often become overwhelmed by their deep-seated irrational fears, which in turn undermine the actual legibility of how they express their thoughts: “The reality – the reality, I tell you – fades.

The inner truth is hidden – luckily, luckily” (11). Thus, even before being introduced to the character of Kurtz, readers already have a good idea, as to what kind of person he actually is. This is because, after having been provided with a glimpse into the Marlow mind’s stream-of-consciousness, they naturally conclude that the very paradigm of living in the midst of primeval wilderness, naturally affects the concerned individual’s mental well-being.

Even though that the narrator’s reflections upon the surrounding ‘darkness’ do not contain an explicit clue, as to what accounts for the actual difference between ‘savages’, on the one hand, and ‘civilized men’, on the other, readers nevertheless do come to recognize this difference’s roots.

This is because the author’s deployment of stream-of-consciousness technique does suggest that, as opposed to what it is being the case with civilized individuals; savages tend to objectualize themselves within the natural environment. Allegorically speaking, they live but what they see, without being able to engage with what they see cognitively, as it would undermine their chances of a physical survival (Segal 637).

The same can be said about civilized individuals that are the path of becoming savages – they simply acknowledge what they see, without bothering to reflect upon the meaning of their visual experiences.

As Marlow noted: “We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth… as we struggled round a bend, there would be a glimpse of rush walls, of peaked grass-roofs, a burst of yells, a whirl of black limbs, a mass of hands clapping, of feet stamping, of bodies swaying, of eyes rolling, under the droop of heavy and motionless foliage” (13).

Therefore, it will not be much of an exaggeration to suggest that it was namely Conrad’s masterful use of the ‘stream-of-consciousness’ narrative technique, which helped his novel to attain a cult-status, more than anything else did. This is because, as it was shown earlier, the deployment of this particular technique in the novel, created objective prerequisites for Conrad’s literary masterpiece to be considered well ahead of its time, in the discursive sense of this word.

Works Cited

Conrad, Joseph 1997, The Heart of Darkness . 6 Mar. 2012. < http://foa.sourceforge.net/examples/darkness/Darkness.pdf >

Joyce, James 2010, The Dead . PDF file. 6 Mar. 2012. < http://english-learners.com/wp-content/uploads/THE-DEAD.pdf >

Kaplan, Robert. “Madness and James Joyce.” Australasian Psychiatry 10.2 (2002): 172-176. Print.

Kessen, William and Emily Cahan. “A Century of Psychology: From Subject to Object to Agent.” American Scientist 74.6 (1986): 640-649. Print.

Segal, Robert. “Jung and Lévy-Bruhl.” Journal of Analytical Psychology 52.5 (2007): 635-658. Print.

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IvyPanda. (2023, December 6). The Use of Stream-of-Consciousness Technique in the Dead and in the Heart of Darkness. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-use-of-stream-of-consciousness-technique-in-the-dead-and-in-the-heart-of-darkness-essay/

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IvyPanda . (2023) 'The Use of Stream-of-Consciousness Technique in the Dead and in the Heart of Darkness'. 6 December.

IvyPanda . 2023. "The Use of Stream-of-Consciousness Technique in the Dead and in the Heart of Darkness." December 6, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-use-of-stream-of-consciousness-technique-in-the-dead-and-in-the-heart-of-darkness-essay/.

1. IvyPanda . "The Use of Stream-of-Consciousness Technique in the Dead and in the Heart of Darkness." December 6, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-use-of-stream-of-consciousness-technique-in-the-dead-and-in-the-heart-of-darkness-essay/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "The Use of Stream-of-Consciousness Technique in the Dead and in the Heart of Darkness." December 6, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-use-of-stream-of-consciousness-technique-in-the-dead-and-in-the-heart-of-darkness-essay/.

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