How to Read Novels like a Professor: A Jaunty Exploration of the World's Favorite Literary Form

Foster quotes Virginia Woolf to show why the novel’s narrative form became more experimental in the 20th century: “Woolf wrote that on or about December 1910, human nature changed” (160). The change referred to new developments in the understanding of the mind. Facing the idea of a subjective consciousness, artists and novelists began to depict reality differently. Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness narrative style unpacked this reality by using the point of view of a highly subjective narrator lost in their thoughts. Events thus unfold less as plot developments and more as observations, feelings, and reminisces. Although defining the stream-of-consciousness style by one variable is difficult, an important marker is that it involves little narrative mediation. In the Victorian novels, the narrative voice is authoritative and is obviously “presenting” a story, whereas stream-of-consciousness works simply immerse readers in a character’s consciousness.

William James first described the term “consciousness,” in The Principles of Psychology (1890), referring to a “chain” of consciousness to describe how one experiences conscious existence as an unbroken series of thoughts. “Stream” replaced “chain” (or “train”), perhaps to convey how thoughts flow into each other.