Stream of consciousness

In literature, a way to represent the way humans think. According to Gibb, "Writers had long before sensed the complexity of man's conscious mind and even his unconscious mind" (246). The way the stream of consciousness is represented is through interior monologue. The interior monologue of a character in a narrative is closely related to the soliloquy in drama, however, Gibb states, "because it represents all of the stream, it is harder to follow" (211).

History

The narrative technique was developed by the French novelist, Edouard Dujardin and named by William James in his book Principles of Psychology. In 1887, Dujardin wrote the first "stream of consciousness" novel, Les Lauriers sont Coupes (Hoffman 124). According to Myers and Wukasch, the stream of consciousness represents "the unbroken flow of thought of a character's conscious and subconscious mind" (346). Writers most known for this kind of writing are James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner (Gibb 246).

Works Cited

• Gibb, Carson. Exposition and Literature. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1971.
• Hoffman, Frederick F. Freudianism and the Literary Mind. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1945.
• Myers, Jack and Wukasch Don C. Dictionary of Poetic Terms. Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2003.