Stream Of Consciousness

Stream Of Consciousness

Stream of Consciousness was a phrase used by William James in his Principles Of Psychology (1819) to characterise the unbroken law of thought and awareness in the waking minds; it has now been adopted to describe and narrative method in modern fiction Long passage of introspection are found in novelist George Meredith and Henry James and some minor French writers like Edward Dujardin in 1888 who attempted to represent all the scenes and events as they impinge upon the consciousness of the central character. The Stream of Consciousness, as it was refined after World War I, is a model of narration that undertakes to capture the full spectrum and flow of character's mental process in which, sense, perception mingle with conscious and half conscious thoughts, memories, feelings and random associations.

Some critics use interchangeably with the term interior monologue. It is useful, however to employ the former as the inclusive term, denoting all the diverse technics, employee by authors to describe or represent the overall state and process of consciousness in a character. James Joyce perfected various technics of Stream Of Consciousness narration in Ulysses (1922). Dorothy Richardson sustains a Stream of Consciousness narrative, focused exclusively on the mind of her heroine, throughout 12 volumes of her novels Pilgrims (1915-1938). Virginia Woolf employs Tue procedure as the chief narrative mode in several novels, including Miss Dalloway (1925) and To The Light House (1927) and William Faulkner exploits it brilliantly in the first three of four parts of his novel The Sound And The Fury (1929).