The Stream of Consciousness Technique as Reflected in Five Selected Novels

This article aimed to find out the use of Stream of Consciousness in the following novels: Mrs. Dalloway, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, The Sound and the Fury, State of War and Pilgrimage. Findings showed that The SOC technique is characterized by the following salient features: unorganized succession of images, fluid ramblings of the mind’s conversations with itself, focused contents of a character’s mind at a given point in space and time and evident skip from one character to another in the middle of the page. In presenting the SOC technique, the different authors have used the following literary devices: flashback, foreshadowing and motif. To enhance the teaching of stream of consciousness technique in fiction, the following suggestions are offered: using motivation strategy through using slides presentation of snippets or excerpts from the novel’, developing literary competence in vocabulary, form, conventions and symbols, giving prior library research on stream of consciousness; likewise, a mini lecture after film viewing, and inclusion of SOC fiction in the preparation of syllabi in literature subjects.