STREAM OF CONCIOUSNESS

TOPIC 1
In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce is experimenting with literary techniques, especially the
use of stream of consciousness. He uses the third person to describe the experiences of Stephen Daedalus, but
everything in the novel is seen through Daedalus. Joyce does not explain what is going on objectively, he simply
describes it as Daedalus experiences it subjectively, in short, episodic accounts. At the beginning of the book,
when Daedalus is a child, Joyce uses childlike prose, as in the opening lines: ONCE UPON A TIME and a very
good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was down along the
road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo
By the end of the book, when Stephen is at university, the dialogue and the narrative is much more
sophisticated.His mind when wearied of its search for the essence of beauty amid the spectral words of
Aristotle or Aquinas turned often for its pleasure to the dainty songs of the Elizabethans. His mind, in the vesture
of a doubting monk, stood often in shadow under the windows of that age, to hear the grave and mocking music
of the lutenists or the frank laughter of waistcoateers until a laugh too low, a phrase, tarnished by time, of
chambering and false honour, stung his monkish pride and drove him on from his lurking-place. This passage
also demonstrates the use of stream of consciousness technique. It describes the way that Daedalus interacts
mentally with his world rather than objectively describing that world itself. In this way, Joyce is able to show with
remarkable nuance how Daedalus develops mentally. Other techniques are employed as well, but much of the
novel is written in a form that can best be described as stream of consciousness. The fact that he does so by
using the third person adds an additional layer of complexity to what is considered one of the great modernist
works of fiction. Indeed, I think that some of the most powerful elements of Joyce's work is his ability to establish
the stream of consciousness style in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The novel's approach of explaining
how Stephen Dedalus achieves consciousness is through Joyce's style of a stream of consciousness. In the
opening pages of the book, we are not given a straight narrative, a seamless understanding that tells us exactly
what is happening. Rather, we are given a series of images told in a narrative that is not entirely coherent.
Moocow, smells, the feeling of an oil sheet, tuckoo are all thrown at us in the opening pages. While this might be
jarring for the reader, it is perfectly appropriate because these pages outline the first moments of Stephen's life,
as an infant, when he is becoming more conscious of the world and his place in it. This style is continued
throughout the novel in Stephen's discussion of religion and the family debates about Irish freedom, the
experience of sin and consciousness of the other sex, and the establishment of different epiphanies that allow
Stephen to gain different forms of consciousness. The stream of consciousness style Joyce uses maintains the
notion that the novel is a bildungsroman, a story about maturation and growth. It also allows the reader to fully
immerse themselves in the life of Stephen without the need for an artificial or distinct narrator. This technique is
mirrored by the philosophical implications of the text. Joyce writes a modernist work that seeks to question the
validity and establishment of structures of power and seeks to create a foundation which critiques these
institutional uses of power. We see this in Joyce's critique of religion and national identity, for example. The
stream of consciousness style is reflective of this as we see that consciousness is not something where there is
one definite vision, one definite narration. This notion of consciousness "is not a seamless fabric; it has
deficiencies and gaps that the organism learns to work around," to quote philosopher Daniel Dennett in his
understanding of consciousness. Certainly, Joyce's style is reflective of the philosophy he is seeking to espouse
throughout his work. Yes. It is. As also are many of James Joyce's works. It is a stream of consciousness novel
because the narrator is not only telling a story, but also having a catharsis by expressing his state of mind and
animosity, or "consciousness" at the time of the action. Most works of this kind tend to be fictional or semi or
totally autobiographical, and you can see that the author, as the narrator, is doing a cathartic revelation.

It is highly psychological, and the mode of narrative is not formal, rather, like the way in which you would speak
with yourself and analyze a situation that is personal to you.

TOPIC 2
Stream of consciousness is a radical style perfected by modernist writers like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. In
general, stream of consciousness is a style of writing that mimics the way real people think. For the most part,
people don't think in tidy, grammatically correct sentences and paragraphs; instead, our thoughts flow together in
run-on sentences and fragments, tumbling all over the place like a "stream" of our own "consciousness." Writers
have approached the representation of this fact in many different ways. Joyce, for instance, painstakingly wrote,
edited, and rewrote his prose so that it had the appearance of free-flowing thought. Jack Kerouac, however,
simply wrote down the first things that came into his brain, thus taking the idea of stream of consciousness to a
literal degree. Joyce's Portrait is an interesting example of stream of consciousness. The novel's prose mimics
the consciousness of its protagonist, Stephen Dedalus, as he grows up in Dublin. The writing style starts out as
babbling and incoherent baby-talk, and gradually matures into the complex and intricate musings of an erudite
young scholar. In this way, the prose is stream of consciousness. That said, Portrait itself represents an intriguing
adolescent phase of Joyce's writing. While there are certainly radical elements in Portrait, Joyce maintains some
conventions of traditional narrative (Joyce will, for instance, permit himself to describe how characters look when
they talk), and so the novel's style is not as radically stream of consciousness as Ulysses. In this later novel,
whole chapters take place within the minds of characters without any (or at least very little) interruption from a
conventional narrator. Thus, while Joyce certainly dabbles in stream of consciousness in Portrait, it is an
incomplete form of the style, and he has yet to reach the perfection that he achieves in Ulysses.