University Mohammed Seddik Benyahia, Jijel

Faculty of Letters and Languages

Department of English
Third Year
Literature

Comparison between
Joyce and Woolf’s use of stream of
consciousness

By:

HARIDI LILIA

&

BOULFOUS CHAHRA

Teacher: Dr. Houda Bouhadjar

Second Semester 2019/2020

Joyce and Woolf’s use of stream of consciousness:
Stream of Consciousness is a literary technique that presents the thoughts and
feelings of a character as they occur. This technique is a very bold literary
innovation of modern period. It records the multifarious thoughts and feelings of
a character without regard to logical argument or narrative sequence. It is a
literary technique that has become common in literary criticism. By this
technique the writer attempts to reflect all the forces, external and internal,
influencing the psychology of a character at a single moment.
Writers who create stream of consciousness works of literature focus on the
emotional and psychological processes that are taking place in the minds of one
or more characters. Important character traits are revealed through an
exploration of what is going on in the mind. Probably the most famous writers
who use the technique of stream of consciousness are James Joyce and Virginia
Woolf. Both Virginia Woolf and James Joyce were influenced by the new
theories about the human mind ,and both of them used interior monologue but in
different ways.
Joyce’s stream of consciousness:
Many writers uses the stream of consciousness technique because it tries to
reproduce the continuous flow of human thought,and what happens in human
mind in the same time in which it is. One of them was James Joyce.
the writer from Ireland wrote his masterpiece “Ulysses” which serves as a
landmark in the modernist literature. He is the earliest and the best known
practitioners of stream of consciousness. He attempted to make a fiction that
would reflect the whole life, conscious and subconscious, without being limited
by conventions of language.James argued that consciousness is not a chain of
ideas, but a river or stream, where components are seamlessly merged.
At the outbreak of the World War I, he started to write his masterpiece
“Ulysses”, published in 1922. It is famous for his stylistic experimentation and
innovation: in fact, he uses the stream of consciousness techinque to explore the
mental and inner truth of all his character.The novel ends with a final
monologue of Molly in which the stream of consciousness is clearly used.
The characters in Ulysses have their own problems and they have an unbroken
flow of perceptions, feelings and thoughts in waking mind. The mental process
of character is vividly shown through stream of consciousness technique. The
characters talk to themselves in mind and they can’t control the continuous flow
of ideas and thoughts.Through this technique, a character’s personality, his past,
his relations, problems and present status and condition are easily exposed to the
readers.
James Joyce successfully employs the narrative mode in his novel Ulysses,
which describes a day in the life of a middle-aged Jew, Mr. Leopold Broom,
living in Dublin, Ireland:“He is young Leopold, as in a retrospective
arrangement, a mirror within a mirror (hey, presto!), he beholdeth himself. That
young figure of then is seen, precious manly, walking on a nipping morning
from the old house in Clambrassil to the high school, his book satchel on him
bandolier wise, and in it a goodly hunk of wheaten loaf, a mother’s thought.”
These lines reveal the thoughts of Bloom, as he thinks of the younger Bloom.
The self-reflection is achieved by the flow of thoughts that takes him back to his
past.
In Joyce’s stream of consciousness characters show their thoughts directly
through interior monologue, sometimes in an incoherent and syntactically
unorthodox way. James is regarded as the best stream of consciousness example.
In his epic work Ulysses, James wanted to show the human mind as it is through
a presentation of association of sensation; memories and either speech, the
thoughts of his characters are presented directly without the interventional of the
narrator. He also was interested in experimenting with language. He created new
words, deformed change their original meaning and used foreign words.
Woolf’s stream of consciousness:
Virginia Woolf Stream of consciousness rendered through: The use of The free
indirect style; the shift of the point of view; an eclipsed third person narrator;
narrative strategies in order to make her readers able to feel close to the
characters’ mind: the “stream of consciousness” expresses the moment when the
individual lives with full consciousness: a moment of being.
Stream of consciousness is an innovative modern technique and a style of
narration that is meant to mimic flow of the human thought. It is a modern
technique that is often associated with Virginia Woolf. Modern writers usually
try to render the human consciousness into a textual form using this literary
technique. It is also defined as a thought presentation through the character’s
mind .Virginia Woolf is very famous for the stream of consciousness technique.
Almost all of her works are written in this form with the aim of presenting the
inner consciousness of the human psyche.
Two of Virginia Woolf’s most notable novels, “To the Lighthouse” and “Mrs.
Dalloway”, are good examples of the narrative device Stream of Consciousness.
At the time, the use of this device was highly experimental. Woolf wrote “Mrs.
Dalloway” by exploring the thoughts ,feelings, and emotions of her characters,
which was very experimental for the time. Woolf’s work exploring the thought,
feelings, moods, and expectations of characters in a seamless way changed the
structure of writing in a significant way, was perhaps one of the most famous
users of stream of consciousness. In earlier works, she was known for
introducing the style, and in later works, she often depended on stream of
consciousness to describe the inner thoughts of her characters in a less linear
style.
Example: “What a lark! What a plunge! For so it always seemed to me when,
with a little squeak of the hinges, which I can hear now, I burst open the French
windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller
than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the
kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as I then was)
solemn, feeling as I did, standing there at the open window, that something
awful was about to happen …” By voicing her internal feelings, the Ms. Woolf
gives freedom to the characters to travel back and forth in time. Mrs. Dalloway
went out to buy flower for herself, and on the way her thoughts move through
the past and present, giving us an insight into the complex nature of her
character.
Woolf does not present her character's thought without controlled ,usually she
respect logical and grammatical organization ,she controls the thoughts of her
characters using a third person narrator ,so the characters fixed in one space
while his thoughts move freely in time. Virginia is recognized as the most
important feminist writer who used the stream-of-consciousness technique to
great significance in her work. Through her stories, Woolf takes readers through
different minds, perspectives and surroundings. Mrs. Dalloway is regarded as
her best work.