Realistic Victorian fiction had aimed to portray reality through a plausible and interesting story. The story involved credible and lifelike characters who spoke naturalistic dialogue in carefully described settings. In the first two decades of the 20th century the reaction against the realistic tradition of Victorian fiction, which had already started at the end of the previous century, became more apparent and writers shifted their interest to the problem of representing individual consciousness.
This emphasis on the individual after the war became part of a general movement in literature usually referred as Modernism [I 1] [S 1]. Modernist novels set out to challenge the traditional conventions of fiction. They were mostly concerned with the search for techniques to portray the complexity of the inner life of the individual.
A problem Modernist writers had to face was the way to portray human consciousness which was now seen as a flux in which past, present and future coexisted. In realistic fiction this problem had been avoided by the use of omniscient narrator [E 1] [I 1] [F 1], who told the events of the story and described those aspects of the inner life of their characters, which were necessary for the story because they helped to explain their behaviour. Psychological aspects were treated by the omniscient narrator in the same way as events and were seen to have the same objective existence.
In Modernist fiction the very existence of objective reality was questioned; the main emphasis was on how to communicate subjective experience. Modernist had to find new ways of representing the new perception of reality. The most important technical innovation was the shifting of the point of view from the external narrator to the minds of the characters. The result was that the narrator disappeared from Modernist fiction. Reality was described through the subjective responses and reflections of the different characters. This new technique was called stream of consciousness [E 1] [S 1] as it aimed to reproduce the flow of thought in an individual’s mind. The result was that the conventional structure of beginning, development and conclusion disappeared. In fact, Modernist writers, such as James Joyce [F 1] [S 1], Virginia Woolf [I 1] [F 1] [E 1] [S 1] and David Herbert Lawrence [I 1] [F 1] dealt with events occurring over a short period of time and focussed on sensations, dreams and recollections of the characters.
