Download Stream of Consciousness and Interior Monologue

. . . Stream of Consciousness and Interior Monologue . . . In psychology, Stream of Consciousness is the total range of awareness and emotive-­‐mental response of an individual, a mixture of lowest pre-­‐speech level to the highest fully articulated level of rational thought. Stream of consciousness can provide a mixture of all the levels of awareness, described at any moment. Varied, disjointed, and illogical elements find expression in a flow of words, images, and ideas similar to the unorganized flow of the mind. Think “neural shimmer.” In literature, Stream of Consciousness is a narrative mode reproducing this internal psychological world, presenting an individual’s subjective, ongoing, and often jumbled or contradictory mental observations and commentary. Often images and the connotations they evoke supplant the literal denotative meaning of words. The term Stream of Consciousness is attributed first to Scottish philosopher Alexander Bain (1855) and then more famously to psychologist William James (1892), brother of the novelist Henry James, who was a friend and occasional houseguest of Virginia Woolf’s family. Although Virginia Woolf and James Joyce are the most well-­‐known 20th-­‐century proponents of this form, French novelist Edouard Dujardin is usually credited with the first sustained use of the technique in his 1888 novel Les lauriers sont coupes (We’ll to the Woods No More). While interior monologue and Stream of Consciousness are often use interchangeably, Stream of Consciousness is more general, encompassing a variety of techniques including interior monologue, which may be direct or indirect. •
Direct interior monologue entails presentation of consciousness in a seemingly transparent, uninterrupted way, from the first-­‐person point of view of a character, without guidance or commentary from a third-­‐person narrator. James Joyce employs direct interior monologue in the final chapter of his revolutionary novel Ulysses (1920). The narrative of this chapter forms one long sentence fragment spanning several pages presenting Molly Bloom’s observations and commentary. •
Indirect interior monologue entails presentation of a character’s thoughts by a third-­‐
person omniscient narrator who serves as selector, presenter, guide, and commentator. Woolf uses indirect interior monologue in her novels Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927). Indirect interior monologue—also known as narrated monologue or psycho-­‐narration—presents shifts from third-­‐person omniscient narration to interior monologue by using verbs of perception such as “he thought” to enter the character’s mind, thus providing some context for the character’s mental flow of description and commentary. Direct Interior Monologue Indirect Interior Monologue William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (1930) is comprised or a series of direct interior monologues by fifteen different characters including Jerel, the illegitimate son of the Bundren family’s dying matriarch Addie. As the family prepares for Addie’s death, Jewel thinks: And now them others sitting there, like buzzards. Waiting, fanning themselves. Because I said If you wouldn’t keep on sawing and nailing at it [the coffin] 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 goddam adze going One lick less. One lick less… The opening lines of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) combine Stream of Consciousness techniques, beginning with third-­‐person omniscient psycho-­‐narration, then shifting to indirect interior monologue: Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. For Lucy had her work cut out for her. The doors would be taken off their hinges; Rumpelmayer’s men were coming. And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning—fresh as if issued to children on a beach. What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her, when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air….