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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 6: X’s and O’s
Explanation and Analysis—X's and O's:
Chapter 6 engages extensively with Scotty Hausmann's inner life as he thinks on the human experience and its connections to technology. Egan portrays his thought process in the stream of consciousness form.
Scotty considers his meager existence in New York City while seated in Bennie's waiting room. His own reflections quickly attempt to approach a universal view of human existence, especially in the wake of the technological age. Egan records Scotty's thoughts as they occur to him, endlessly generating and refining themselves:
Here was the bottom line: if we human beings are information processing machines, reading X's and O's and translating that into what people oh so breathlessly call "experience," and if I had access to all that same information via cable TV and any number of magazines [...] if I had not only the information but the artistry to shape that information using the computers inside my brain (real computers scared me; if you can find Them, then They can find you, and I didn't want to be found), then, technically speaking, was I not having all those same experiences those other people were having?
This passage is meandering: a number of ideas about human nature and technology, language and knowledge, information and philosophy occur to Scotty at once. Egan captures the associations Scotty makes in real time by using stream of consciousness. Punctuation is uneven; sentences are long and difficult to follow; interjections like "oh so breathlessly" express new, unrealized thoughts before complete ideas can be fully recorded.
Through Scotty's stream of consciousness, the reader receives direct access to Scotty's indifference to his situation. Later, peculiar ideas surface in Scotty's mind about the inherent sameness between a corporate and menial job, the nonexistence of the boundary between inside a gala and outside it, and how everything is a figment of one's imagination. Stream of consciousness in this moment allows readers to understand the confused and complicated mind from which Scotty's beliefs emerge.
Related Themes:
