Eng426 20th century english literature

Stream of Consciousness Technique: The point of view of the novel resembles human thought. The stream-of-consciousness technique involves recording the thought processes as they arise in the mind of the various individuals without any evident links or connection. In Mrs. Dalloway, there seems to be no coherence in the thought patterns of a character. From the first page of the novel, Clarissa’s thought of buying flowers for herself, jumps to Lucy’s work being cut out for her, to the hinges of the window to the freshness of the air and the memory of Peter Walsh, Elizabeth, and other matters.
These myriads of thought are seen throughout the novel as perspectives of different characters are seen. In addition, through the use of this technique, characters bring the past into the present, allowing the meaning and remembrance of the present to be shaped by the past. Woolf moves from one character’s thought to another without the reader being fully aware of it as we move from one character’s consciousness to another. She also uses the stream-of-consciousness technique to connect her characters as she presents several characters whose lives and experiences are connected through individual thoughts. The characters are known not by their actions but mainly by their innermost thoughts and these thoughts are not ordered but spontaneous are quite revealing. This fragmented, disordered structure of the subconscious mind for the modernist writer like Woolf is the true nature of human existence. In this novel, Woolf shows that life lacks order and that it is human beings that introduce relative logic or order into it.
Convoluted and Fragmented Plots: The idea of oneness and togetherness in form, law, order or sequence is challenged in the face of modernism. Modernists make use of narrative disjunctions or sudden shifts from one character’s consciousness to another. In Mrs. Dalloway, there is no chronological arrangement of events or actions as readers are made to follow the thought patterns of characters as they move from one concern to another; as a result, the narrative jumps from the present to the past and back to the present again, especially in the consciousness of Clarissa and Septimus. There is the influx of many characters in the first pages of the novel which makes it difficult to follow the development of the story. As noted in earlier, the novel itself has no chapter divisions. It is the chiming of Big Ben and the line demarcation that signal the introduction of a new character or event.