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Situational Irony
Definition of Stream of Consciousness
Stream of consciousness is a style or technique of writing that tries to capture the natural flow of a character's extended thought process, often by incorporating sensory impressions, incomplete ideas, unusual syntax... read full definition
Stream of consciousness is a style or technique of writing that tries to capture the natural flow of a character's extended thought process, often by incorporating... read full definition
Stream of consciousness is a style or technique of writing that tries to capture the natural flow of a character's... read full definition
Chapter 1
Explanation and Analysis—Interrupted Thought:
A Room of One's Own is written in the stream-of-consciousness style, popularized in part by Woolf herself. What emerges as notable within this particular style are the moments that the narrator's thought is interrupted. Note, in the following two passages from Chapter 1, the phenomena that disturb the fluidity of the narrator's constant stream of thought:
It was impossible not to reflect—the reflection whatever it may have been was cut short. The clock struck. It was time to find one’s way to luncheon.
All was dim, yet intense too, as if the scarf which the dusk had flung over the garden were torn asunder by star or sword—the flash of some terrible reality leaping, as its way is, out of the heart of the spring. For youth—— Here was my soup. Dinner was being served in the great dining-hall.
In both passages, mundane reality cuts in to disturb the narrator's poignant reflections. Ironically, these mundane disturbances arise from her surrounding scholarly environment—a setting meant to inspire and sustain intellectual meditation, not disrupt it. Such interjections from the outside world represent a suppression of curiosity and investigation and an intrusion of linear time into the free, unfettered stream of the narrator's consciousness. Generally speaking, time works differently in stream-of-consciousness writing, often unsegmented by traditional temporal markers used to segment narratives.
