Stream of consciousness (narrative mode)

For other uses, see Stream of consciousness (disambiguation).

In literary criticism, stream of consciousness is a narrative mode that seeks to portray an individual's point of view by giving the written equivalent of the character's thought processes, either in a loose interior monologue, or in connection to his or her actions.

Stream-of-consciousness writing is usually regarded as a special form of interior monologue and is characterized by associative leaps in syntax and punctuation that can make the prose difficult to follow. Stream of consciousness and interior monologue are distinguished from dramatic monologue, where the speaker is addressing an audience or a third person, which is used chiefly in poetry or drama. In stream of consciousness, the speaker's thought processes are more often depicted as overheard in the mind (or addressed to oneself); it is primarily a fictional device. The term was introduced to the field of literary studies from that of psychology, where it was coined by philosopher and psychologist William James.

Stream of consciousness is the continuous flow of sense‐perceptions, thoughts, feelings, and memories in the human mind or a literary method of representing a blending of mental processes in fictional characters, usually in an unpunctuated or disjointed form of interior monologue. The term is often used as a synonym for interior monologue, but they can also be distinguished, in two ways. In the first (psychological) sense, the stream of consciousness is the subject‐matter while interior monologue is the technique for presenting it; thus Marcel Proust's novel A la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27) is about the stream of consciousness, especially the connection between sense‐impressions and memory, but it does not actually use interior monologue. In the second (literary) sense, stream of consciousness is a special style of interior monologue: while an interior monologue always presents a character's thoughts ‘directly’, without the apparent intervention of a summarizing and selecting narrator, it does not necessarily mingle them with impressions and perceptions, nor does it necessarily violate the norms of grammar, syntax, and logic; but the stream‐of‐consciousness technique also does one or both of these things. An important device of modernist fiction and its later imitators, the technique was pioneered by Dorothy Richardson in Pilgrimage (1915–35) and by James Joyce in Ulysses (1922), and further developed by Virginia Woolf in Mrs Dalloway (1925) and William Faulkner in The Sound and the Fury (1928). For a fuller account, consult Robert Humphrey, Stream of Consciousness in the Modern Novel (1968).

Precursor

Les Lauriers sont coupés (1887) by Édouard Dujardin can be perceived as a precursor of the 'stream of consciousness' writing-style, because of his renunciation of chronology in favor of free association: « Il a pour objet d'évoquer le flux ininterrompu des pensées qui traversent l'âme du personnage au fur et à mesure qu'elles naissent sans en expliquer l'enchaînement logique. » Thereby anticipating the stream of consciousness narratives of Joyce and of Virginia Woolf.

Notable works

Examples of notable works employing stream of consciousness are:

A

• Rabih Alameddine's Koolaids: The Art of War (1998), an example of a postmodern application of stream of consciousness
• Jerzy Andrzejewski's Gates to Paradise (1960)
• António Lobo Antunes's later works
• Oğuz Atay's Tutunamayanlar (The Disconnected) (1972)

B

• Will Christopher Baer's Phineas Poe trilogy (2005)
• Bahram Bayzai's Death of Yazdgerd (1982)
• Samuel Beckett's 'trilogy' :
  • Molloy (1951)
  • Malone Dies (1951)
  • The Unnamable (1953)
• Alan Bennett's A Cream Cracker Under The Settee, (1987)
• Giuseppe Berto's Il male oscuro (1964)
• Carry van Bruggen's Eva (1927)
• William Burroughs's Naked Lunch (1959)
• Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621)

C

• Albert Camus' The Fall (1956)
• Anton Chekov's Short Stories and Plays (1883–1903)
• Daniel Clowes' "Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron"
• Albert Cohen's Belle du Seigneur (1968)
• Julio Cortázar's Rayuela (Hopscotch) (1963)
• Michael Cunningham's The Hours (1998) (an homage to Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway)

D

• Mark Z. Danielewski's
  • Only Revolutions (2006)
• Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren (1975)
• John Dos Passos's The 42nd Parallel(1930)
• Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground (1864)
• Autran Dourado's
  • Voices of the Dead (1967)
  • Pattern for a Tapestry (1970)
  • Bells of Agony (1974)
• Édouard Dujardin's Les Lauriers sont coupés (1888)

E

• Dave Eggers's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000)
• T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915)
• Bret Easton Ellis'
  • Less Than Zero (1985)
  • The Rules of Attraction (1987)
  • American Psycho (1991)
  • The Informers (1994)
  • Glamorama (1998)
  • Lunar Park (2005)
• James Ellroy's White Jazz (1992)

F

• William Faulkner's
  • The Sound and the Fury (1929)
  • As I Lay Dying (1930)
  • Absalom, Absalom! (1936)
  • Intruder in the Dust (1948)
• Jack Feldstein's stream-of-consciousness neon animations.
• Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything is Illuminated (2002)
• F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby(1925)
• John Frusciante's Niandra Lades and Usually Just a T-Shirt

and Smile From The Streets You Hold

G

• Lewis Grassic Gibbon's Sunset Song (1932)
• Kaye Gibbons' Ellen Foster (1987)
• Nadine Gordimer's July's People (1981)

H

• Knut Hamsun's Hunger (1890) and Mysteries (1892)
• Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf (1927)
• Hilda Hilst's novels.

J

• The State of America, A Journal by Doug Jackson (2010)
• James Joyce's
  • Eveline (1914)
  • A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
  • Ulysses (1922)
  • Finnegans Wake (1939)

K

• Jack Kerouac's
  • On the Road
  • Visions of Cody
  • Lonesome Traveler
  • "Big Sur" (1962)
• Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962)- particularly Chief Bromden's thoughts during electroshock therapy.

L

• Clarice Lispector's whole work
• Dimitris Lyacos's "Z213: Exit" (2009)

M

• Hugh MacDiarmid's A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1926)
• Cormac McCarthy's
  • Suttree (1979)
  • Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West (1985)
• Patrick McCabe's The Butcher Boy (1992)
• Wang Meng's Voices of Spring
• Henry Miller's
  • "Tropic of Cancer" (1934)
  • "Black Spring" (1936)
  • "Tropic of Capricorn" (1938)

O

• Alan Duff's Once Were Warriors (1990)

N

• Gaspar Noé's Enter the Void (2009)

P

• Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club
• Sylvia Plath's "The Bell Jar"
• Marcel Proust In Search of Lost Time, (or À la recherche du temps perdu ) 1913 - 1927
• Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (1973)

R

• Rumi's Masnavi (1258–1273)
• Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)
• Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage (1915–28)
• Mercè Rodoreda's The Time of the Doves (1962)
  • Kiss Me, Judas
  • Hell's Half Acre
  • Penny Dreadful (parts)

• Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (1981)

S

• Muslih al-Din Sa'di Shirazi's Bostan ("The Orchard") (completed in 1257), Gulistan ("The Rose Garden") (1258)
• J. D. Salinger's
  • Seymour: An Introduction (1963)
  • The Catcher in the Rye
• Arthur Schnitzler's Lieutenant Gustl (1900), 'Fräulein Else (1924)
• Hubert Selby Jr.'s
  • Last Exit to Brooklyn (1964)
  • The Room (1971)
  • Requiem for a Dream (1978)
• Sam Selvon's The Lonely Londoners (1956)
• Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony(1977)
• Sasha Sokolov's A School for Fools (1960)
• William Styron's Lie Down in Darkness (1951)
• Italo Svevo's La coscienza di Zeno (1923)

T

• Pier Vittorio Tondelli's
  • Altri libertini (1980)
  • Pao Pao (1982)
• Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun (1939)

W

• Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting (1993)
• Robert Anton Wilson & Robert Shea's Illuminatus! (1975)
• Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun (1980–83)
• Virginia Woolf's
  • Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
  • To the Lighthouse (1927)
  • The Waves (1931)

The technique has been parodied, for example, by David Lodge in the final chapter of The British Museum Is Falling Down.

References

• Cohn, Dorrit. Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction, 1978.
• Friedman, Melvin. Stream of Consciousness: A Study in Literary Method, 1955.
• Humphrey, Robert. Stream of Consciousness in the Modern Novel, 1954.
• Sachs, Oliver. "In the River of Consciousness." New York Review of Books, 15 January 2004.
• Shaffer, E.S. (1984). Comparative Criticism, Volume 4. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 119. http://books.google.nl/books?id=Y39_jR4ZUmgC&pg=PA124&lpg=PA124&dq=jakob+van+gunten+stream+of+consciousness#v=onepage&q=walser&f=false. Retrieved 12 Jan 2011. 

See also

• Stream of consciousness (psychology)
• free writing