On the Craft of Fiction by Claudio V. Tabotabo, MA (December, 2004)

The Stream of Consciousness in literature is one of the important features of Modernism and Post-modernism. It is started by Edouard Dujardin (1861-1949) in his novel Les Laurkiers Sont Coupe's (1888) although William James had used the phrase first. Writers like William Faulkner, Virginia Wolf, James Joyce and many others have adopted the style.

Stream of Consciousness as a method of writing branched off from the traditional plot-centered stories. Writers following this style are not concerned on what happened to the characters. Physical actions are not well emphasized in the story unlike the traditional fiction that follow the sequence of actions from Situation to Climax and to Denouement (resolution, the ending part of the story).

In the Stream of Consciousness what are being pictured out in the story are the series of thoughts and feelings of the characters.

In the story of a battered wife for instance, the main concern being dramatized in the story is not the what happened to the battered wife. Instead the story pictures out the feeling and thinking of the battered wife. As feature of modern writing of fiction, it is concerned on the feeling of the people and not what happened to the people in a certain situation.

Some writers particularly D.H. Lawrence does not recognize Stream of Consciousness as a technique of fiction writing. These writers still cling to the old style of elucidating the plight of their characters.

Basically, under the mimetic (imitation) theory of Plato, art aims to imitate the natural. Under this principle the artist must exhaust all means to produce something that will imitate as exactly as it is its object. If a painter for instance paints a mountain, his product must appear as exactly as the real mountain appears so that if an onlookers are not careful enough will mistakenly apprehend that what they are looking at is the real mountain though it is only a piece of paper where the artist had captured the real mountain. Another situation is the movie, Saving Private Ryan, and the longest Day, which picture out the Allied landing at Omaha Beach in the Second World War where soldiers scampered into the beach beneath the pounding of German cannons and barking of machine guns. Under the mimetic principle, the movie must recall and reproduce the landing, and the reproduction must be an exact facsimile of the actual landing that even a dot of difference there must be none.

But the stream of consciousness does not look at the physical reality of its object. Men in the height of refinement are not interested of the actions. They want to see the feeling and thinking of their fellow men in a particular situation.