Idea Post -- Stream of Consciousness -- 2.10

SUGGESTIONS FROM WIKIPEDIA:

1. Ostensibly unedited, spontaneous live or recorded performances, as in film, music, and dramatic and comic monologues, intended to recreate the raw experience of the person portrayed or the performer

2. a narrative mode used as a literary, cinematic, theatrical, or lyrical technique

3. (psychological) the flow of thoughts in the conscious mind

Stream of consciousness as a narrative device is generally characterized as a form of interior monologue that hasn't been sent through an editing process that would typically clarify the thoughts of a person to the audience experiencing said monologue, it is as if the monologue is being observed in the brain. The term was introduced by American philosopher and psychologist William James and he described it as a sort of mind-world connection. This resulted in a major influence for avant-gard AND modernist literature and art.

Several well known literary figures have used this type of writing in their works including William Faulkner, Jack Kerouac, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Marcel Proust, Virginia Wolfe, Samuel Beckett, Hermann Hesse, J.D. Salinger, Albert Camus, Bret Easton Ellis, Mark Z. Danielewski, and Thomas Pynchon. Of these writers, the best example of what I'm trying to explain here is going to be T.S. Eliot's the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, which can be read in its entirety here. Below is an excerpt:

And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!	75
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep … tired … or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?	80
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head [grown slightly bald] brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,	85
And in short, I was afraid.

From the poem, the reader is unsure of exactly what Eliot is writing about but is still able to feel the tone of his writing which is in direct correlation with my work.  The story itself is unimportant, but the feelings that can be extracted from the writing, the dots that can be connected, those are places where the real meaning lies.