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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 7
Explanation and Analysis—And Hacketts Wondered:
Through stream of consciousness, Chapter 7 opens with a dizzying train of thoughts. Player Piano shifts to private Elmo Hacketts’s perspective as the Shah’s limo glides past, and its narration devolves into Hacketts’s hardly comprehensible inner monologue:
And Hacketts wondered where the hell he’d go in the next twenty-three years and thought it’d be a relief to get the hell out of the States for a while and go occupy someplace else and maybe be somebody in some of those countries instead of a bum with no money looking for an easy lay and not getting it in his own country or not getting a good lay anyway but still a pretty good lay compared to no lay at all but anyway there was more to living than laying and he’d like a little glory by God and there might be laying and glory overseas…
The novel’s free indirect discourse hands over the narrative reins to Hacketts, who unleashes a flurry of frustration and angst. Hacketts thinks that “it’d be a relief to get the hell out of the States for a while,” only to then muse about “getting a good lay.” His thoughts drift from his IQ to “Hot Cross Buns” and to pants that “ought to have zippers,” forming an impressively incoherent jumble. Pages of run-on sentence present Hacketts's countless grievances until they blur and overwhelm.
This uncontrollable torrent of thoughts gives a sense of his pent-up anger. More tragically, the sequence suggests a loss of humanity—it is as though Hacketts has lost his ability to express himself. Condemned to the tedium of military work and “bum-like” poverty, he can hardly explain his own thoughts to the reader. His senseless stream of thought and feeling is yet another reminder of how machines and humans have all but swapped places.
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