Dave's Book Blog: Stream of consciousness / Interior Monologue

Some critics see SoC and IM as different but when David Lodge in The Art of Fiction states that IM is “rather like monitoring an endless tape-recording of the subject’s impressions, reflections, questions, memories and fantasies, as they are triggered either by physical sensations or the association of ideas” he seems to me to be describing SoC. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory treats them as synonymous; the Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms suggests that 'stream of consciousness' is the subject matter while 'interior monologue' is the technique so that Proust's A La Recherche du Temps Perdu is about SoC but not an interior monologue. In support of this distinction, SoC was first used by psychologist William James (brother of novelist Henry) to describe thought processes in Principles of Psychology in 1890 and only later applied in literary criticism (by May Sinclair in a review of Dorothy Richardson's Pointed Roofs) while IM was first used by Valery Larbaud in an essay about the work of James Joyce.

Works that employ SoC/IM rarely dispense with narrative. For example, the first sentence of Mrs Dalloway is “Mrs Dalloway said that she would buy the flowers herself"; while the first sentence of the Leopold Bloom section of Ulysses starts with “Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls"; these are both examples of direct narration.

Some critics regard Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne as a precursor of SoC/IM. It is certainly hugely digressive as Tristram, the narrator, gives his opinions on the other characters even from before his birth.

Dostoevsky (in, for example, Notes from Undergound, and White Nights) includes long passages of introspection which are similar to IM.

James Joyce acknowledged that he developed his technique after reading Les Lauriers sont coupés (1888) by Édouard Dujardin. Knut Hamsun who wrote Hunger in 1890 is regarded as another pioneer.

The first SoC work in English is often regarded as Pointed Roofs (1915) by Dorothy Richardson; the first volume of her twelve volume novel sequence entitled Pilgrimage. James Joyce had already been experimenting with the technique in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, although that wasn't published until 1916. He then developed it in Ulysses in which the three main characters are differentiated by the structure of their streams of consciousness.

Virginia Woolf further developed this technique in Mrs Dalloway (1925) in which the interior monologue swaps from person to person as in a game of tag. She elaborated this again to more consciousnesses (and even, one might think, the setting's consciousness or perhaps the Jungian collective (un)consciousness) in To The Lighthouse (1927).

William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury reverts to the Joycean system of providing each of his four different SoC characters with their own section of of the book but the first section is an ‘idiot’ (as in the quote from Macbeth which describes life as "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.") whose sense impressions are muddled with his memories to create a chronologically confusing turbulent stream of thought.

Other novels that employ SoC/IM include: