Stream of consciousness, Interior monologue

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 447.

Dramatic or objective point of view

When an author uses a dramatic or objective point of view, the story seems to be told by no one. This narrative technique has often been compared to a videocamera left running. The narrator does not mediate between the story and the reader. He steps aside and allows the story to present itself through setting, action and dialogue. The reader is never taken inside the minds of the characters. He is presented with material which he alone must analyse and interpret. Although the narrator does not actively participate in the storytelling, he does have an important role to play in this type of narrative. It is the narrator who decides when to turn the videocamera on and off and where to point it. He decides what material to present and his choices will obviously affect the reader's response. The dramatic point of view is widely used by modern writers because of the impersonal and objective way it presents experience.

Third-person narrators:

Stream of consciousnessis the term applied to any attempt by a writer to represent the conscious and subconscious thoughts and impressions in the mind of a character. This technique takes the reader inside the narrating character's mind, where he sees the world of the story through the thoughts and senses of the local character. At the beginning of the twentieth century some authors, notably James Joyce. Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner, developed a stream of consciousness technique called interior monologue.The term is borrowed from drama, where monologue refers to the part in a play where an actor expresses his inner thoughts aloud to the audience. In fiction, an interior monologue is a record of a characters, thoughts and sense impressions.

As people do not think in complete, well-formed logical sentences, Joyce, Woolf and Faulkner abandoned traditional syntax, punctuation and logical connections in order to represent the flow of a character's thoughts. For example, in Joyce's Ulysses (1922) the reader finds himself with a transcript of one of the character's thoughts which contains no commas, full stops or capital letters. The stop, start, disjointed and often illogical nature of interior monologue makes it a challenge for the reader to interpret.