William James 'Stream Of Consciousness'

William James coined the phrase “Stream of Consciousness” in his book named Principles of Psychology in 1890. James entailed consciousness as a stream as according to him human consciousness is a fluid. It is an unbroken flow of feelings, emotions, impressions, fantasies, awareness and half- organized thoughts. Although consciousness is like persistence similar to time but is independent to time. At a given instance of time, an individual’s consciousness solely might not be pertained to the present. It may be reliving the past experiences or might virtually fantasize the future. The clock of subjective consciousness is autonomous of the mechanical clock-time. The stream of consciousness technique used by novelists is a revolutionary technique

The build-up of the twienth century, stream of consciousness novel is noted with the disappearance of the author, where the author furnishes the readers with the consciousness of the character as directly and as objectively as possible. Also, it is an experimental shift from the experiential reality to the experiencing self, illuminating the psyche of the characters and penetrating insight into the dilemmas of

Modernist novels covered the most basic and general issues in their novels. The modern issues were complex, immense and difficult to lay down in words, therefore innovative techniques were found to impersonate feelings, emotions and inner psyche of an individual to truthfully address them. The modern novel is realistic. It deals with all the facts of contemporary life, pleasant as well as the unpleasant, the beautiful as well as the ugly, and does not present merely one-sided view of life. Life is presented with detached truth and accuracy, irrespective of moral or ideological conditions. The woes and sufferings of the poor, their misery and hardships, as well as the good in them, their sense of social solidarity, their fellow-feeling, sympathy and empathy are all realistically demonstrated. The modern novel has evolved as a serious art form. It is packed in body and integrated in form and everything superfluous is cautiously avoided. It is a well-cut garden rather than a tropical jungle which the Victorian novel was. Essentially, they amount to an abandonment of the direct and rather loose biographical method in favour of an indirect or oblique narrative, with a great concern for the aesthetic considerations of pattern and composition, and a new conception of characterisation built upon the study of the inner