Even the novels by authors who are most closely associated
with stream-of-consciousness -- such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and WIlliam
Faulkner -- often only show stream-of-consciousness in sectons of the novels. Reading an
entire novel written in stream-of-consciousness is possible, of course, but it would
probably also be painful.
Different writers use
stream-of-consciousness differently, but the tendency is to seek to disrupt the
traditional structure of narrative. Some writers do without standard punctuation and
sentence structure, for example. Other writers seek to place images and sensations
side-by-side, so that they're experienced immediately rather than filtered through the
unifying voice of a narrator. Here's an example of the latter from the opening to James
Joyce's novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man:
Once upon a time and a very good time it was
there was a moocow coming
down along the road and this moocow that was coming
down along the road
met a nicens little boy named baby
tuckoo...
His father told him that story: his father looked at him
through a
glass: he had a hairy face.
He was baby tuckoo.
The moocow came down the road where Betty Byrne
lived: she sold lemon
platt.
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