Modern Novel

Novel: Most important and popular literary medium. Deals the relations between loneliness and love.

Modern Novel: Realistic as opposed to idealistic, psychological.

Realistic: Consider truth to observe facts about outer world, about his own feelings.

Idealistic: Create pleasant and edifying picture.

Psychological: Nature of consciousness and its relation to time, made difficult to think of consciousness, tends to see it as altogether fluid, existing, story becomes unreal and unsatisfactory.

Origin of the term: William James coined the phrase to describe the flux of the mind, its continuity and yet
its continuous change.

Consciousness: An amalgam of that we have experienced and continue to experience. Every thought is a part of the personal consciousness, unique and ever-changing. We seem to be selective in our thoughts, selectively attentive or inattentive, focusing attention on certain objects and areas of experience, rejecting others, totally blocking others out.

• Means of escape from tyranny, indicate the precise nature in a limited time, gives a complete picture of a character both historically and psychologically.
• A technique that reveals the character completely historically as well as psychologically.
• Development in character which is difficult.
• Character can be presented outside time and place.
• First represents the presentation of conscious from chronological sequence of events, and then investigates a given state of mind so completely.

Previous methods: Two different methods were adopted in the delineation of character.

1. Personalities of characters emerge from a chronological account of events and reactions to it as in Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge.
2. First a descriptive portrait of the character is given and the resulting actions and reactions elaborate that picture as in Trollope’s Barchester Towers.

• “Stream of consciousness” novelist is responsible for an important development, dissatisfied with these traditional methods.
• Impossible to give a psychological accurate account of a man, interested in dynamic aspects rather than static.
• Present moment is specious denoting the ever fluid passing of the ‘already’ into the ‘not yet’, gives the reaction to a particular experience at the moment but also his previous and future reactions.