The interior monologue, Dispense di Inglese

The interior monologue

[James Joyce]

The American psychologist James coined the phrase “stream of consciousness” to define the continuous flow

of thoughts and sensations that characterized the human mind. This definition was applied by literary critics

in the 20th century referring to that writers that focused on the inner process. Introspection was already

present in 18th century novels especially in Defoe’s; the 19th century novel presented its characters as social

beings but also as individuals whit moral and emotional inner life. At the begging of the 20th century, writers

gave more and more importance to subjective consciousness and understood that it was impossible to

reproduce the complexity of the human mind using traditional techniques for this reason the adopted the

• Its being free from introductory expression;

• The presence of two levels of narration; one external to the character’s mind, the other internal;

• The lack of chronological order and presence of subjective time;

• The absence of the rules of punctuation;

• The lack of formal logical order;

There are four kinds of interior monologue:

1. Indirect interior monologue characterized by the following devices: the author is presented within

the narration; the character’s thoughts can be presented both directly and by adding descriptions; the

character stays fixed in space while his consciousness moves freely in time: in the character mind

everything happens in the present. The inner time is irregular and is opposed to the external time