Representative writer of stream of consciousness

At the end of the 19th century, French writer Edouard Dujardin (1861-1949) published the novel "The Cut Down Laurel". This work always uses the artistic technique of "inner monologue" and is regarded by later generations as the forerunner of stream-of-consciousness literature. After entering the 20th century, stream-of-consciousness writers perfected the stream-of-consciousness creation method and made it mature. Around the 1920s, stream-of-consciousness literature entered a period of prosperity.

The founder of stream-of-consciousness literature is the French writer Marcel Proust (1871-1922). His representative seven-volume novel "In Search of Lost Time" practices the author's "subjective realism" artistic view and is a model of "simple" stream-of-consciousness literature. This work laid the foundation for the development of stream-of-consciousness literature.

The famous British novelist and critic Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) is also a famous stream-of-consciousness writer and the founder of stream-of-consciousness novels. On the basis of summarizing and learning from the creations of some stream-of-consciousness novelists, she enriched and developed the expression techniques of stream-of-consciousness literature and theoretically elucidated it. In 1919, Woolf published her first stream-of-consciousness novel, The Spot on the Wall. The work reveals the richness and changeability of the human inner world through a woman's consciousness flow process when she sees a vague spot on the wall and arouses endless associations. "Mrs. Dalloway" (1925) and "To the Lighthouse" (1927) are Woolf's representative works of stream-of-consciousness novels. The former shows Mrs. Dalloway's sudden change of consciousness after she meets her old lover Peter again at a family party and learns that a mentally ill man nearby has committed suicide; the latter uses a lot of symbolism to express the author's feelings about the novel. The longing for the other side of the world that transcends fame, grievances, and grievances presents to readers the deep consciousness of the characters.

Woolf's novels do not pay attention to the relationship between events and characters, but focus on the reproduction of the characters' thoughts and feelings, and pay attention to the impression effect of the description of the environment and scenery. Her writing style is rich in musicality, and she uses musical "formology" to structure her works, giving readers a sense of beauty.

The Irish writer James Joyce (1882-1941) is one of the representative writers of stream-of-consciousness literature. He was born into a middle-class family in Dublin, but his family declined after his birth. He determined to dedicate himself to literature very early on, striving to express the aesthetic ideal of human inner reality purely and objectively through creation. In 1902, Joyce went to Paris to study medicine. He lived in many European countries from time to time throughout his life and devoted himself to literary creation.

Joyce’s works never left Dubliners and their lives. The early collection of short stories "Dublins" (1914) consists of 15 short stories with the same theme, describing the diverse lives of the middle and lower classes of Dublin citizens, with a distinct tendency towards realism. "Portrait of an Artist in His Youth" (1916) was a turning point in the development of Joyce's thought and art. The work makes extensive use of common expression techniques in stream-of-consciousness literature such as inner monologue, time and space interlacing, and free association to reveal the inner world of the protagonist from childhood to youth. The author's writing has reached into the protagonist's subconscious realm. The novel "Finnegan's Wake" (1939), written in his later years, is full of allegorical color. The whole novel uses sleep-talking language to express the recurring central theme of death and resurrection in human history. The language is obscure, new words appear repeatedly, and it is difficult and difficult. Understand.

The novel "Ulysses" (1922) took 8 years to complete. It is Joyce's masterpiece and a masterpiece of stream-of-consciousness literature. It "applies" the framework of Homer's epic "The Odyssey" and is divided into 3 chapters and 18 parts. It also echoes it in character design and plot arrangement. But the author turns the myth of the ancient Greek hero Ulysses (Odysseus) who wandered at sea for 10 years into the story of Bloom, a modern ordinary person, wandering the streets of Dublin in one day, thus hinting at the end of the heroic age and contemporary times. The fate of ordinary people is tragic. "Ulysses" is very different from traditional realist novels. It comprehensively uses the expression method of stream of consciousness to express the serious spiritual crisis of modern Westerners through the flow of the characters' subconsciousness. Therefore, the novel is regarded as an encyclopedia of stream of consciousness by Western critics. The work has a highly narrative plot in traditional novels, but it mainly focuses on the life and inner activities of Bloom and Stephen in Dublin during the 18 hours from 8 a.m. on June 16, 1904 to 2 a.m. the next day. Incorporate their past experiences and spiritual life into the disordered flow of their consciousness and express them respectively. Bloom's wife Molly is mostly shown through the vision of others in the novel, and does not appear directly until the end of the chapter. The author ends the work with her long internal monologue while lying on the bed, half asleep and half awake. Their experiences cannot constitute a complete and orderly plot clue, and the occurrence of events has no sequence connection with the development of time. However, they have become one external source after another for the flow of characters' consciousness, bringing out the characters' continuous flow of knowledge. This kind of conscious activity is completely different from the logical, organized and psychological descriptions under the control of rationale in traditional novels. Instead, it is not limited by time and space, not restricted by logic, and has great leaps, randomness and incoherence. A display of the original state of human consciousness.

There are only three core characters in the work, and they show multi-layered, complex and contradictory personalities.

Leopold Bloom, an advertising contractor for a newspaper, is mediocre and humble, but loyal and kind; his wife, Molly, who is slightly famous, is indulged in carnal desires, but she also longs for true love in her heart; the history of private high schools Teacher Stephen Dedalus is spiritually empty but refuses to give up his fantasy. Through them, Joyce vividly depicts the true image of people in modern Western cities. They no longer shine with the glory of ancient heroes, and their spirits are no longer noble, but they still cling to the spiritual home of humanity. The author shows people a panoramic view of the soul of modern people. Compared with the narrative method of other stream-of-consciousness writers, Joyce adopts the "interleaved" stream-of-consciousness writing method in "Ulysses", that is, what each person thinks has nothing to do with others. Although there is sometimes overlap, it is accidental. Caused, because the characters do not need to face the same thing at the same time. This narrative method makes the content of the novel more scattered. In addition, the extensive use of "inner monologue" in the work makes "free association" extremely spanning and arbitrary, making it difficult for readers to read and understand.

American writer William Faulkner (1897~1962) is another outstanding representative of stream-of-consciousness literature. Faulkner was born into a family of aristocratic plantation owners in northern Mississippi in the south of the United States. In 1926, under the guidance and help of Sherwood Anderson, he published his first novel "A Soldier's Pay". In 1929, his transitional work "Satoris" came to the world, marking the beginning of the "Yoknapatawpha Lineage" novel that the author struggled for throughout his life. Faulkner chose different families in the fictional town of "Yoknapatawpha" as his subjects, and used their stories to form novels that showed the rise and fall of southern American society over the past century and a half and the changes of people from all walks of life. The ups and downs of honor and disgrace. The novels of the Yoknapatawpha lineage include 15 novels and a large number of short and medium-length novels. Among them, important works such as "As I Lay Dying" (1930) use multi-perspective narrative methods and extensive use of stream-of-consciousness techniques to create "a primitive story about human endurance." "The Fable" (worded by Michael Milgate); "August Light" (1932) focuses on three clues of equal development to describe the struggle of a loner, Jew Christmas, who cannot find his place in society. and the story of destruction; "Absalom, Absalom! "(1936) uses the narration and analysis of several people to show the rise and fall of the manor owner Thomas Sutburn. The work has an epic structure and a rich tragic atmosphere. Faulkner's most representative work is the novel "The Sound and the Fury" (1929).

"The Sound and the Fury" is set in the town of Jefferson. It describes and expresses the life and spiritual world of the descendants of the Compson family, a once-prominent but now declining family. The book is divided into four parts, each with titles taken from four days in the life of the Compson family. Each part tells the same story from the flow of consciousness of the idiot Benjy, his brother Quentin and Jason, as well as from the narrative perspective of the author himself. The central point is the fate of Compson's daughter Katie. Compson and his wife, descendants of a wealthy southern family, were depressed, lived an empty life, and had no warmth or love for their children. Daughter Katie is passionate and unrestrained, and has difficulty integrating with the family. When she grew up, she accidentally lost her virginity to a dandy, which later led to a tragic marriage. She was abandoned and became a prostitute. Katie's brother Benji was born an idiot and was full of attachment to his sister; Katie's brother Quentin had incestuous feelings for his sister. Cody's loss of virginity and running away caused a huge mental blow to them: Benji lost his only support for his spirit, and Quentin's traditional southern values ??established since childhood were devastated, and he finally chose to commit suicide. Among the siblings, only Jason is in tune with the times. He is selfish, despicable, and jealous of his sister. He looks for opportunities to blackmail his sister and her illegitimate daughter who are in trouble. In this environment, only the black maid Dilsey has a clear mind and can rationally judge right and wrong; the author examines each character from her standpoint, and at the same time, through her, she also reflects the workers' humiliation-bearing and kind-hearted character.

Faulkner used the "composite" stream of consciousness expression technique to narrate the beginning and end of the same story through the flow of consciousness of characters with different personalities, experiences, and qualities in different time periods, resulting in It creates the effect of a compound flow of consciousness. Although there are some repetitions, there is no sense of similarity. The reason is that the focus of the author's description is not the story of Katie's mother and daughter's fall itself, but the impact of this event on the hearts of different people and the spiritual changes it caused. The story becomes an organic part of the consciousness process of the three characters, leading readers into the inner world of various characters. The novel is not narrated in chronological order and requires readers to participate in creation while reading and assemble the entire process of events. This shows that there is an inherent order to the story that occurs under the seemingly inverted and chaotic time sequence. The narrative perspective of the work is from the inside out, and the constant changes in the narrator's thoughts become the main line of the content of the work. The jumping and changing thoughts in the article are not explained in clear words, but by means of changing fonts, tone, titles, etc., which require readers to discern carefully.

Joyce Carol Oates (1938~) is a famous contemporary American female writer and another representative of stream-of-consciousness novels in the United States. Oates was born into a working-class family in Lockport, a suburb of Buffalo, upstate New York. After graduating from high school, she received a scholarship to study literature at Syracuse University, and then entered the University of Wisconsin, where she received a master's degree. After graduating from university, she taught in universities in Canada and the United States.

Oates's literary creation can be roughly divided into two stages.

The novels "Childhood", "The Fall of Zhansu" (1964), "Paradise on Earth" (1967) and other novels written and published in the 1960s are basically based on realism methods. Since the 1970s, Oates has gradually focused more on psychological description and the exploration of the subconscious. Some people say that she later became a "psychological realist" writer, but most of them classify her into the category of stream-of-consciousness novels. Since the 1970s, her main works include the novels "At Your Mercy" (1973), "The Assassin" (1975), and "Childewood" (1976); the short story collection "The Cycle of Love" (1970), "Marriage and Infidelity" (1972), "Goddess and Other Women" (1974), "The Hungry Ghost Collection" (1974), "Seduction and Other Stories" (1975), "Poisonous Kisses and Other Stories" (1975), " "Passing the Border" (1976), "The Dark Side" (1977), etc. The novel "At Your Mercy" published in 1973 has an obvious modernist color. After that, she further accepted the influence of Joyce, Faulkner and Freud in an attempt to explore a new path for novel creation. There is a short story in her "Goddess and Other Women" published in 1974, entitled "About the Case of Bobby T.", which can be regarded as her masterpiece in this area. The novel describes the story of a 19-year-old black youth who defended himself after being provoked for no reason, and was arrested and imprisoned as a result. The young man spent 19 years in prison. When he was released from prison, he had become a timid little old man who was afraid of getting into trouble. The author believes that the cause of this tragedy is the "collective unconscious" of American society, which means that part of an individual's subconscious thinking is determined by race, ethnicity, family, era, history and other factors. Deep-rooted racial discrimination is deeply buried in people's subconscious minds and controls people's actions. The little girl Frances and others who directly caused the tragedy of black youth did not intentionally provoke, but because they were infiltrated into the unconscious. Dominated by the concept of racial discrimination, it has unconsciously brought a lifetime of sorrow to black youths. The novel obviously imitates the stream-of-consciousness technique of Joyce, Faulkner and others. In terms of the concept of time and space, he also accepted the influence of Bergson's theory, but he did not copy it and made some innovations.