What does stream of consciousness mean?

Now sit back and just for one minute try to watch and follow all the thoughts going through your mind like a spectator. Isn't it chaos? There are writers who do this and who also transfer the entire consciousness into writing. It makes the reader stunned and forget where and whose brain he is in at what time. stream of consciousness technique it's not for the faint of heart.

What is the Stream of Consciousness Method

What is Stream of Consciousness Technique?

Stream of consciousness technique, In novel and story writing, it is a narrative technique that tries to transfer what goes on in the protagonist's mind to the written word as it happens, without interrupting it or putting it in a certain order. The perception of time is completely out of the ordinary. The narrative does not follow a straight, chronological order, in fact it cannot be followed. Human consciousness and thought do not go straight anyway. The novelist writes whatever he thinks at that moment, whichever time he goes to.

What is Stream of Consciousness? Let's take a look together.

Inside the Hero's Brain

In this narrative technique, the reader gets a taste of being inside the minds of the novel's protagonists... Time can sometimes take the form that he or she perceives and makes sense of. Because time already gains meaning with the value we give it.

A Journey to the Past from the Edge of a Shop Window

There is no chronological order in the narrative and the past, the future and the present moment are intertwined. Most of the time nothing very important happens in the present, the protagonist is by the sea, on a bench or in front of a shop window. Sometimes he is immersed in a small spot on the sea. With such a frame drawn, the author disappears and leaves the reader alone with the protagonist's consciousness.

Everything Can Mean Everything

How to Understand Stream of Consciousness Technique?

Sometimes everything happened in the past. The reflection of the projections of the past on the present moment is actually the subject around which the novel revolves. In a sense, the protagonist relives the past in the present and in his/her brain. While any object or image around him evokes something to the individual, it actually opens the door for the events of the past to be remembered and take the stage in his thoughts.

Stream of Consciousness Authors

Stream of consciousness technique The first name that comes to mind worldwide is James Joyce. The first book that comes to mind of the author who uses this technique in almost all his works is of course 'Ulysses'... We can say that Virginia Woolf is the queen of this technique. Dostoyevsky, too, occasionally went beyond interior monologues in his books and shifted to the stream of consciousness technique.

We can say that he used this method especially in Notes from the Underground. Among Turkish novelists, it would be a shame not to give Oğuz Atay as an example of those who use this technique most beautifully and frequently.

Who among us hasn't been tossed from one place to another while reading The Incontinents? Vedat Türkali, Orhan Pamuk and Yusuf Atılgan are among the writers who have created wonders in their novels with this technique.