rocesses, either in a loose interior monologue, or in connection to his or her actions.
In the field of literary criticism, M.H. Abrams gives a definition of stream of consciousness: “Describe[s] the unbroken flow of perceptions, thoughts and feelings in the waking mind”. 1According to his definition in A Glossary of Literary Terms, stream of consciousness is the name for a special mode of narration that undertakes to reproduce, without a narrator’s intervention, the full spectrum and the continuous flow of a character’s mental process, in which sense perceptions mingle with conscious and half-conscious thoughts, memories, expectations, feelings, and random associations. Stream of consciousness refers to the content or the subject-matter of a literary work; it refers to the specifically-described, theme-reflecting perceptual life and psychological phenomenon contained in a literary work.
2.1.2 The features of stream of consciousness
The first feature of stream of consciousness is interior monologue. Stream-of-consciousness writing is usually regarded as a special form of interior monologue and is characterized by associative leaps in syntax and punctuation that can make the prose difficult to follow. In stream of consciousness, the speaker’s thought processes are more often depicted as overheard in the mind (or addressed to oneself). Stream of consciousness emphasizes the origin of a narrative from inside the mind of a single character, rather than from an objective and distanced third party.
The second feature of stream of consciousness is free association. The narrator conveys a subject’s thoughts, impressions, and perceptions and without the logic and grammar of typical speech and writing. Rather than summarizing what the characters see, think and do, reporting from the outside, or tidying up a character’s thoughts into standard, clear sentences, author tries to give the reader an impression of what it is like to be inside the characters’ heads.
The third feature of stream of consciousness is inversion of time and space. It’s a combination of thought, sensation, memory, description, action, and speech. The author is trying to give a more realistic picture of psychology than had ever before been presented in fiction. The lack of some punctuation in stream of consciousness narratives accentuates the rapidity of the thoughts and the means by which they flow into one another. It also gives a sense of real time – as though the author is having the thoughts at the sense speed at which we read them.
2.2 The application of stream of consciousness in the fiction
2.2.1 The expression of stream of consciousness in the fiction
While reading through literature works across culture, readers are always finding out that the fictions of the stream of consciousness are still inevitable confounded with a challenge or rather a specially contradiction between the readability and the sense of reality and the description of conscious activities, even through the writers have tried hard to solve this problem above, yet less successfully. Meanwhile another challenge, which comes from a great task for the stream-of-consciousness writers to accomplish, concerns the accurate verbal description of the non-verbal states of mind. And this is beyond the ability of an arties or a writer, for the mystery of consciousness including subconsciousness, of course, is still out of man’s intellectual reach. Nevertheless, Ernest Hemingway presents us in his outstanding style with his precious artistic exploration of the human consciousness and subconsciousness in his short story The Snows of Kilimanjaro.
The story begins with some bantering dialogue between the main character, Harry, and his wife, Helen, both sitting beneath a mimosa tree waiting for a rescue plane to
