50 Best examples of the "stream of consciousness" style

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1.Ulysess - Joyce

2.Lolita - Nabokov

― Zeno, Monday, 9 April 2007 02:44 (eighteen years ago)

3. JR - Gaddis

― franny glass, Monday, 9 April 2007 15:39 (eighteen years ago)

4. Double or Nothing - Federman.

― Casuistry, Monday, 9 April 2007 18:18 (eighteen years ago)

Hm, 5. Clairvoyant Journal - Weiner.

― Casuistry, Monday, 9 April 2007 20:40 (eighteen years ago)

6. The Unfortunates - B.S. Johnson

(I could put a couple of others of his in, but I think this is the best, and most true to the style.)

― emil.y, Monday, 9 April 2007 22:15 (eighteen years ago)

Walt Whitman?

― aimurchie, Tuesday, 10 April 2007 00:43 (eighteen years ago)

7. Becket - the trilogy (or is it 7,8 and 9?!)

8. Faulkner - the sound and the fury

9. Faulkner - as i lay dying

10. Vitginia woolf - A room of one's own

― Zeno, Tuesday, 10 April 2007 17:15 (eighteen years ago)

one month passes...

The last few pages of St Gerard, by Kerouac

― pinkmoose, Tuesday, 15 May 2007 14:04 (eighteen years ago)

Call It Sleep & Studs Lonigan get very stream-y in parts

― gershy, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 07:42 (eighteen years ago)

Lolita isn't stream-of-consciousness.

― Noodle Vague, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 11:33 (eighteen years ago)

I guess JR isn't either.

― franny glass, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 13:06 (eighteen years ago)

Are there two uses of the phrase stream-of-consciousness? I often see the phrase, but about two groups of writers that strike me as very different from one another. At odds with one another, even.

What Joyce was up to was a literary technique for showing what's going on in a character's head; with Kerouac et al it seems more a method of showing what's in the author's head while he's writing.
The latter strikes me as a naive interpretation of jazz-improvisation - that it's something people are born with, rather than having worked hard for - that the authors have tried to transpose over to a different art form. Maybe I'm the one being naive, as it's a style that takes a great deal of skill to do well in its own right.
The (good) books of that form seem like transcribed narratives of entertaining talkers. To me that's a very different sort of literature from what Joyce was doing, and so the SoC term easily becomes confusing. Context helps, of course, but it just strikes me as odd when it results in Joyce and Kerouac being compared.

Oh well, I'll add one I've not read, just because I've seen it referenced in a few essays as one of the first places the technique was put to use.

13. Ovid - Metamorphoses

― Øystein, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 13:20 (eighteen years ago)

That's more in the Kerouac style, though. Or at least, for the few hundred lines I've read, it's s-o-c in the sense that the author keeps wandering from one story to the next seemingly haphazardly by whatever tenuous link he wants to follow. There wasn't much internal thought-rambling on the part of the characters.

Of course, narrator as character and all that.

― Casuistry, Wednesday, 16 May 2007 14:41 (eighteen years ago)

I can't believe I forgot Nicholson Baker.

― franny glass, Sunday, 27 May 2007 22:35 (eighteen years ago)

I'm not sure if I'd read "A Room of One's Own" as stream-of-consciousness; it seems more in the tradition of the "musing essayist" type of thing. But I can understand making the association, given the tone of the essay and the fact that Woolf did a number of pieces which were very definitely s-o-c. Search her short stories of the 'teens and early '20s - "The Mark On The Wall" and "An Unwritten Novel" being perhaps the best. She went on to expand the technique to the scale of the novel with Jacob's Room, Mrs. Dalloway, To The Lighthouse, etc.

I'd say all are closer to Joyce than Kerouac - the narrator keeps a distance but we slip very effortlessly inside people's heads and catch them following the tangents of the day. Mrs. Dalloway is probably the best, not only as a novel but as an interesting example of the style, as even the plot and the scene changes also begin to take on a kind of streamlike, dreamlike motion. (I haven't ever managed to track down a quote, but I remember being told that Woolf greatly disliked Joyce's handling of the problem, which she found inelegant in its attempt to convey the reality of thought through sheer bulk.)

All of which is to say,

14. Virginia Woolf - "Mrs. Dalloway"

― Doctor Casino, Tuesday, 29 May 2007 05:38 (eighteen years ago)

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