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Revision as of 23:02, 7 February 2006
In literary criticism, stream of consciousness denotes a literary technique which seeks to describe an individual's point of view by giving the written equivalent of the character's thought processes. Stream-of-consciousness writing is strongly associated with the modernist movement. Its introduction in the literary context, transferred from psychology, is attributed to May Sinclair.
Stream-of-consciousness writing is usually regarded as a special form of interior monologue and is characterized by associative (and at times dissociative) leaps in syntax and punctuation that can make the prose difficult to follow, tracing as they do a character's fragmentary thoughts and sensory feelings. Stream of consciousness and interior monologue must be clearly distinguished from dramatic monologue, where the speaker is addressing an audience or a third person, and is used chiefly in poetry or drama. In stream of consciousness, the speaker's thought processes are more often depicted as overheard (or addressed to oneself) and is primarily a fictional device.
The earliest precedent of any literary work using this technique is possibly Ovid's Metamorphoses in ancient Rome. With its rapid, unconnected association of objects, geometrical shapes and numerology, Sir Thomas Browne's discourse The Garden of Cyrus (1658) may, upon examination of its text, be considered one of the very earliest examples of stream-of-consciousness writing. Another would be The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne, (1760). Further examples of the development of this style are The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allen Poe (1837/1838) and Édouard Dujardin's Les Lauriers sont coupes (1888). Tolstoy used something similar to the stream-of-consciousness technique in Anna Karenina (1877) in the portions leading to the climax; another early example is Arthur Schnitzler's 1900 short story Leutnant Gustl. Stream of consciousness writing gained rapid prominence in the twentieth century. Famous writers to employ this technique in the English language include Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and William Faulkner.
A few of the more famous works to employ the technique are:
- Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment
- Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage (1915-28)
- James Joyce's Ulysses (in particular Molly Bloom's soliloquy)
- Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and The Waves
- William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying
- Jack Kerouac's On the Road
- J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye
- Robert Anton Wilson's & Robert Shea's Illuminatus!
- Allen Ginsberg's poem Howl
Brian W. Aldiss' 1969 novel Barefoot in the Head employs a stream of consciousness style as a necessary part of the plot. The leading character, a Serbian named Charteris, wanders through a Europe aerosol-bombed with a persistent psychedelic chemical agent in a war between Europe and an "Arab coalition". Europeans are consequently on a permanent acid trip and are only able to think in streams of lateral associations of tangential ideas.
The technique has also been parodied, notably by David Lodge in the final chapter of The British Museum Is Falling Down.
Other meanings
- In psychology and philosophy stream of consciousness, introduced by William James, is the set of constantly changing inner thoughts and sensations which an individual has while conscious, used as a synonym for stream of thought.