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Setting
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 11: Mabel
Explanation and Analysis—Mabel's Thoughts:
The Underground Railroad makes free indirect discourse a mainstay of its narration. Passages throughout the story borrow from characters’ innermost thoughts to create the impression of speech. In Mabel’s section, this form of narration increasingly resembles a stream of consciousness. The novel provides access to her unfiltered thoughts as she lays in the marsh bed during her escape:
All those faces, living and dead. Ajarry twitching in the cotton, bloody foam on her lips. She saw Polly swinging on a rope, sweet Polly, who she’d come up with in the quarter, born the same month. Connelly transferred them from the yard to the cotton fields the same day. Always in tandem until Cora lived but Polly’s baby didn’t—the young women delivered within two weeks of each other, with one baby girl crying when the midwife pulled her out and the other making no sound at all. Stillborn and stone. When Polly hung herself in the barn with a loop of hemp, Old Jockey said, You did everything together. Like Mabel was supposed to hang herself now, too.
Mabel’s sequence of thought leaps haphazardly from one subject to the next—she thinks of Ajarry, Polly’s child, and Old Jockey. Her stream of consciousness creates a tissue of people and names bound by a web of shared sorrows. Her thoughts are also deeply disjointed if not broken. Most of Mabel’s thoughts are fragmentary impressions, half-formed phrases—“stillborn and stone,” for instance—that lack a definite narrative shape. Stream of consciousness leaves it to the reader instead to assemble the story of Ajarry’s death, the death of Polly’s child, and her own suicide. Its fractured quality is also a powerful critique, suggesting that slavery produces a personal experience that is necessarily incomplete.
If stream of consciousness underscores the traumatic effects of slavery, it also offers a chance at empathy and redemption. It immerses the reader immediately into the characters’ thoughts, more intimately than any other narrative method would do. Mabel never got the opportunity to clear her name or present her part in the narrative. Nearing the end of the novel, she finally can. Stream of consciousness gives voice to those who were denied the chance to speak.
Related Themes:
