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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
Pages 246-287
Explanation and Analysis—Something Imponderable:
“The Road” relies on moments of free indirect discourse to develop a stream of consciousness. By introducing passages with the man’s voice, parts of the novel also reveal his trains of thought. While he is traveling along the road, the tremors in the ground unleash a haphazard, largely incoherent sequence of thinking:
He got up and walked out to the road. The black shape of it running from dark to dark. Then a distant low rumble. Not thunder. You would feel it under your feet. A sound without cognate and so without description. Something imponderable shifting out there in the dark. The earth itself contracting with the cold. It did not come again. What time of year? What age the child? He walked out into the road and stood. The silence. The salitter drying from the earth. The mudstained shapes of flooded cities burned to the waterline. At a crossroads a ground set with dolmen stones where the spoken bones of oracles lay moldering. No sound but the wind. What will you say? A living man spoke these lines? He sharpened a quill with his small pen knife to scribe these things in sloe or lampblack? At some reckonable and entabled moment? He is coming to steal my eyes. To seal my mouth with dirt.
The man’s thinking is distracted, jittery, and confused—the passage shifts from his sensory observations of the “low rumble” to questions about his son’s age and then the identity of a person buried in the “dolmen stones.” The stream of consciousness abounds with sentence fragments and nouns, whose nightmarish quality offers a fitting reflection of the world around. Like the man’s thoughts, nothing in this post-apocalyptic reality makes sense. Stream of consciousness disorients the reader on the page just as the world overwhelms its characters in the novel.
Related Themes:
