Can you provide examples of modern (past 50 years) novels that use the stream of consciousness, multiple narrator technique that Faulkner used in As I lay Dying?
{EDIT} While we're at it, can you name novels that use the technique of two (or more) stories braided together until they mesh into one that Rushdie used in The Satanic Verses?
Last edited by Summer M; 10-20-2012 at 02:58 AM.
I haven't read it but I understand from the reviews that Will Self's latest novel and Booker Prize contestant "Umbrella" uses the technique referred to as stream of consciousness".
What is stream of consciousness? Would Trainspotting by Irvine Walsh count? It has multiple narrators from what I remember, or at least it had a different narrator each chapter. A book with two stories that eventually came together was Ian M. Banks' Inversions, which despite being one of his sci-fi books is not very futuristic. Umberto Eco's The Island of the Day Before had three strands (iirc), but annoyingly, they never really came together.
According to Aldous Huxley, D.H. Lawrence once said that Balzac was 'a gigantic dwarf', and in a sense the same is true of Dickens.
Charles Dickens, by George Orwell
My Name is Red (by Orhan Pamuk) has many different narrators who, interestingly enough, introduce themselves by name whenever the narrative is shifted to them (as depicted in the title).
"The farther he goes the more good it does me. I don’t want philosophies, tracts, dogmas, creeds, ways out, truths, answers, nothing from the bargain basement. He is the most courageous, remorseless writer going and the more he grinds my nose in the sh1t the more I am grateful to him..."
-- Harold Pinter on Samuel Beckett
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote