The Use of Stream of Consciousness in the Portrait

1079 Words5 Pages
1. Introduction: The first decades of the twentieth century, writers became fascinated by the mental activities which mean the inner lives. The stream of consciousness is a modern narrative technique and we can identify it as the flow of the multitudinous random feelings and thoughts which pass through the mind, so it's a theme or a purpose more than a technique. According to Robert Humphrey, "Stream of consciousness is the continuous flow of sense- perceptions, thoughts, feelings and memories in the human mind; or a literary method of representing such a blending of mental process in fictional characters, usually in an unpunctuated or disjointed form of interior monologue". (p. 44).In other words, it is a literary technique in which the writer follows the auditory, associative, visual and subliminal impressions and then expresses them by using the interior monologue of the character with violating the grammar norms and using the illogical order. There are some advantages of using this technique such as: having a great Profundity and inwardness, a complete objectivity and a complete freedom from the constraints of time. This term was first appeared by psychologist and philosopher William James in 1890 in The Principles of Psychology. One of the greatest stream of consciousness novelists Is James Joyce. In his novel "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ", he shows us how his protagonist Stephen Dedalus found his dream and became an artist after experimenting with politics and religion. In this paper I will focus on the use of the stream of consciousness in Joyce's The Portrait. 2. Stephen's Childhood: In The Portrait, the author uses the stream of consciousness style in order to tell the reader what Stephen is thinking. In chapter two, the narrative prose gives the reader an open window to Stephen's
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