/

SOME EXPONENTS OF THE STREAM-OF-CONSCIOUSNESS

TECHNIQUE IN MODERN AMERICAN FICTION
by
DOROTHY O. GOLDEN, B.A.
A THESIS
IN
ENGLISH
Submitted to the Graduate Faculty
of Texas Technological College
in Partial Fulfillment of
the Requirements for
the Degree of
MASTER OF ARTS
Approved

August, 196S

13

173(

^^

No. I'?
Ccrp. 2'

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am deeply indebted to Dr. Everett A.
Gillis for his direction of this thesis.

His

helpful criticism, his patience, and his

generosity with time have provided the encouragement necessary for completion of this work,

ii

CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ii

INTRODUCTION

I.

ANOTHER LOOK AT FAULKNER

18

ECHOES OF FAULKNER

59

III.

THE SEARCH OF THE ANTI-HERO

86

IV.

ACCEPTANCE OF THE QUOTIDIAN

114

II.

CONCLUSION

144

LIST OF WORKS CITED

147

ill

INTRODUCTION
THE STREAM-OF-CONSCIOUSNESS NOVEL:
SOME DEFINITIONS
The stream-of-consciousness technique in fiction
received much critical attention during the second and
third decades of this century.

Although the origin of

this type of fi-ction is not clearly known, it is generally

agreed that James Joyce was chief promulgator of the new
technique.

The method has since been widely usedand in

some cases, abusedand is the subject of much criticism,

both laudatory and derogatory.

A part of this continuing

debate on the value of such writing concerns the problem

of just what a stream-of-consciousness novel really is.
Numerous labels have been offered in efforts to define
this unique approach:

the "thought-stream novel" or

2
3
simply the "stream novel;" the "time novel;" the

Shiv K. Kumar, Bergson and the Stream of Consciousness Novel (New York, 1963), p. 2.
Paul West, The Modern Novel (London, 1965), I,
p. 46.
3
Leon Edel, The Psychological Novel (New York,
1955), p. 143.

2
4
"psychological novel;" and, more broadly, "experimental
5
novel."

A few critics have attempted to find similarities

betv/een fiction using the technique and the impressionistic

school of painting and have consequently designated it
"post-impressionistic."^

Other critics of a considerably

7
greater number have used the term "syitibolistic novel,"
Q

and still others, the "novel of subjectivity."

Perhaps

the term which lias been most widely accepted, though it

is a rather unwieldy phrase, is the "stream-of-consciousness
9
novel," referring to the description of mental activity
as set forth by the psychologists Sigmund Freud and
William James. A related problem of definition has been
whether to classify the use of stream of consciousness as
a technique or a genre.

But however the method is labeled

4
Leon Edel, The Modern Psychological Novel (New
York, 1964), p. 11.
5
Robie Macauley and George Lanning, Technique in
Fiction (Evanston, 1964), p. 88.
Herbert Muller as quoted in Kumar, Bergson, p. 4.
7
Edmund Wilson quoted in Kumar, Bergson, p. 5.
8
Edel, Psychological, p. 202.
9
Robert Humphrey, Stream of Consciousness i_n the
Modern Novel (Berkeley, 1962), p. 1. Subsequent page
references to Humphrey's work are to this edition.
^ Ibid., pp. 1-2; Melvin Friedman also considers
this question in Stream of Consciousness; A Study in
Literary Method (New Haven, 1955), p. 3.

or categorized, the consensus is that such v/riting is an

important part of our literary heritage and that variations
of this method in fiction will continue to be used in the
future.
Despite difficulties of classification, several
essential characteristics of the stream-of-consciousness
point of viev7 are clear.

For example, in Robert Humphrey's

opinion, the stream-of-consciousness writers "have created

a fiction centered on the core of human experience,"
adding "mental functioning and psychic existence to the
already established domain of motive and action in the
novel" (p. 22); and creating a new "approach to the presentation of psychological aspects of characters in fiction"
(p. 1 ) . Such novels, he concludes, are identified more
by subject matter than by "techniques, purposes, or
themes" (p. 2 ) . Melvin Friedman expresses essential
agreement with Humphrey when he says:

"The stream of

consciousness novel should be regarded as the one which

has as its essential concern the exploitation of a wide
area of consciousness, generally the entire area, of one
11
^
,_
.
or more characters."
Further agreement may be seen in
statements by Robie Macauley and Robert Penn Warren, vzhich,
separately, offer similar opinions.

Friedman, Stream, p. 3.

Macauley declares

that the reader has "a sense of direct participation in a

character's mental processesespecially in those processes
12
of which the character himself /is/ unav/are.
To this
Warren adds that one methodused by Faulkner in at least
two of his booksis to let each character unfold in his
13
own language or flow of being before us.
Kumar may be
included in this same group of critics on the basis of his
comment that behind "the new mode of portraying character
as a ceaseless stream of becoming" (p. vii) is Bergson's
concept of durational flux.

On this same point, once more

Kumar quotes Edward Bowling's judgment that the stream-ofconsciousness novel is "a direct quotation of the mind
not merely of the language area but of the whole
consciousness" (p. 3 ) .
There is general agreement also among the major
portion of present-day critics that, the users of various
streams of consciousness "attempt to give the reader an
effect of living thought."

Leon Edel is possibly a bit

more exact in his terminology In what he calls the "inward

12
Macauley and Lanning, Technique, p. 88.
^"^Robert Penn Warren, "William Faulkner, " in Forms
of Modern Fiction, ed. William Van O'Connor (Minneapolis,
1948), p. 130.
^^Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago,
1961), p. 324. Subsequent page references to Booth's
work are to this edition.

turning to convey the flow of mental experience, /trying/

15
to capture for the reader the atmosphere of the mind."
Humphrey's statement of this point of viev; is that the
stream of consciousness is concerned with "levels more
inchoate than rational verbalization of communicable
16
awareness."
Both Humphrey and Friedman maintain that
the stream-of-consciousness novel attempts to convey
primarily the prespeech or preconscious level, though
Preidman also asserts that "consciousness is actually the
17
entire area of mental activity, "

which may at the same

time include various gradations from unconsciousness to

complete awareness.
That the reader of the novel is directly involved
in the experience is generally now accepted.

Booth says

that "every reader is his own producer" (p. 324), and Leon
Edel declares that the experience of the reader may be
"as complex and subjective" (p. 145) as that of the writer.
However, all critics are not agreed as to the value of the
reader's experience.

Joseph Warren Beach maintains that

William Faulkner's use of the stream of consciousness

15
Edel, Psychological, p. 7 of Foreword.
1"Humphrey, Stream, pp. 2-3.
17
Friedman, Stream, p. 3,

results in great bewilderment for the reader."'"^ Robert

Liddell is of the opinion that James Joyce's attempt, in
Ulysses, "to make homo fictus coextensive with homo sapiens"
19
is a failure,
and Orville Prescott's evaluations in his
book Ijn My Opinion

suggest the unnecessary and over-

whelming obscurity of such writers as Joyce and Faulkner,

among others.

Both Muller and Weidle define "the new

novel . . . as a withdrav/al from external phenomena into

the flickering half-shades of the authDr's private world."
Some critics insist that the reader's subconscious must
be in the same state as the author's in order to realize
the experience of the novel, and others see the "thoughtstream" novel as similar to the process of psychoanalysis.
The stream-of-consciousness novel does present
difficulties both for the reader and the v/riter. The
problem of the v/riter is "to represent consciousness
realistically by maintaining its character of privacy
(the incoherence, discontinuity, and private implications)
and still to communicate something to the reader through

18
Joseph Warren Beach, American Fiction 1920-1940
(New York, 1942), p. 169.
19
Robert Liddell, A Treatise on the Novel (London,
1955), p. 91.
20
(Indianapolis, 1952), passim.
21
As quoted in Kumar, Bergson, p. 2.

21

22
this consciousness."

Such writing often captures thought

units as they seem to originate within the character's

consciousness rather than as they would be deliberately
expressed by him in a conventional novel.^^

Such presen-

tation, in turn, often imitates thought by disregarding

both formal syntax and logical thought progression.
Such liberties, plus an absence of punctuation and of
inhibition, such as in Molly Bloom's interior monologue,
tend to give the reader the sense of mental flow.
Wyndham Lewis objects, on the other hand, that such a
"romantic abdominal method" represented by the stream-ofconsciousness viewpoint "results in a jellyfish structure,
without articulation of any sort."

In addition to the

lack of normal syntax and punctuation, stream-of-consciousness

^writers frequently find it necessary to violate chronological
sequence"Perhaps in imitation of the human consciousness
27
itself" i n order to present to the reader "what is
22
Humphrey, Stream, p.
23
Humphrey, Stream, p.
24
Macauley, Technique,
25
Edel, Psychological,
26
Ibid., p. 187.
^'^Ibid., p. 151.

62.
23.
p. 88.
p. 134.

8
28
happening at the very moment."

Perhaps the most force-

ful answer to the critics of the stream-of-consciousness

method is C. P. Snow's statement that the stream-ofconsciousness novel is "a singular mixture of invented
colloquialism.and inflated 'poetic' mandarin, delivered
in a tone as near as possible to an alcoholic's mumble."

29

Yet for proponents of stream-of-consciousness writing,

"the psychic viVidness of prolonged and deep inside views"
can produce an intense sympathy for characters who do not
30
have any strong virtues to recommend them;
and the
novelists v/ho use the stream-of-consciousness method "are
essentially concerned v/ith presenting individual personality
31
in terms of artistic sensibility,"
a "deliberate effort
to render in a literary medium a new realization of
.32
experience as a process of dynamic renewal."
In order to present' such an aesthetic experience,
the major stream-of-consciousness v/riters have variously
employed the same basic devices:

e.g., free association

^^Ibid., p. 153.
^^Paul West, The Modern Novel (London, 1965), I,
p. 46.
^^Booth, Rhetoric, pp. 377-378.
31
Kumar, Bergson, p. 3.
^^Ibid., p. 2.

9
according to psychologic. 1 laws, standard rhetorical figures,
33
and images and symbols.
Hov/ever, with regard to the use
of symbols, the novelist can record his imaginative exO A

perience in only "the most approximate way,"

since they

constitute, as it were, substitutes for rationally for35

mulated ideas.
According to Friedman, the sections of
the stream-of-consciousness novel are knit together mainly
by such methods of continual cross reference of symbol and
image (p. 24), rather than by the process of action.

The

extreme use of figurative language and of classical rhetorical devices, such as personification, hyperbation, anacoluthon,
litotes, and of course, simile and metaphor, along with
many others, may lead us eventually, according to West,
to regard the stream-of-consciousness method as the least
disciplined form of romantic poetry."
Melvin Friedman lists three- broad methods which
are available to the stream-of-consciousness writer, namely,
interior monologue, internal analysis, and sensory impression.
More useful, to the critic, perhaps, are Humphrey's categories.

Humphrey divides Friedman's internal monologue

33
Humphrey, Stream, p. 64.
Edel, Psychological, p. 145.
35
Humphrey, Stream, p. 19.
^^West, Modern, p. 37.

10
into' direct interior monologue and indirect interior
monologue;

The direct form is used for representing

psychic content and processes partly or entirely unuttered

(p. 23). The indirect method approximates Friedman's
internal analysis, in which the author summarizes the
impressions of the character in his own words, and is consequently closer to directed thinking and rational control.
Two other categories used by Humphrey are omniscient
description, which gives the consciousness or psychic life
of a character, and soliloguy, which communicates emotions
and ideas related to plot and action and which has greater
coherence than interior monologue because an audience is
assumed (p. 30) . He further explains that the use of
soliloquy is a combination of the interior stream with
exterior action.

Other critics, notably Harry Levin, have

also included, as typical of the stream-of-consciousness

novel, the cinematic device of montage, which is used to
express movement and coexistence, or the inner life
simultaneously with the outer life.
Only Humphrey, of the v/riters noted in this paper,
has given any attention to the structural patterns employed
in the stream-of-consciousness novel. He lists the most
frequently used ones as (1) the unities, which usually
have their framework in the external world; (2) leitmotifs;
(3) previously established literary patterns, which are

11
often burlesqued; (4) symbolic structures; (5) formal
scenic arrangements; (6) natural cyclical schemes, such as
in Woolf's The Waves; and (7) theoretical cyclical schemes,
such as musical structures and historical cycles (p. 86).
Certainly every stream-of-consciousness work has some basic
structural pattern; and though it may be hard to discern
through the "circuitous, associative demands of the un37
conscious, "
t>iese works can best be comprehended by such
an approach.
From the foregoing discussion, it probably can be
safely concluded that the representative examples of the
stream-of-consciousness novel do have certain characteristics in common;

They attempt to present the different

levels of consciousness, varying in their degrees of

inclusiveness, of one or more characters; they look both
inward into the mind and outward from that mind at the
world.

For representing this double vision, certain devices

are common:

the interior monologue, in some degree or

other; an extensive use of sensory impression, expressed

in figurative and symbolic language; lack of directive
commentary, since to all intents and purposes, the author
is virtually effaced, and of the traditional aids of
conventional paragraphing, syntax, and punctuation.

The

37
1948), p.Alex
93. Comfort, The Novel and Our Time (London,

12
reader, consequently, must of necessity immerse himself
in this strange fictional world of another's consciousness
in order to feel and understand the whole of the novel.
Despite these difficultiesor maybe because of themthe
reader's experience is often much more intense and rewarding
than that gained from reading the more conventional forms
of fiction.
For the purpose of clarity of reference in the
present examination of some recent works of fiction, the
following definitions are used.

(1) Interior monologue:

interior monologue is a rather general term which may be

used to define those sections in a novel which record the
obviously inner activity of a character, regardless of the
levels of consciousness used.

(2) Direct Interior monologue;

the term direct interior monologue is used to indicate

those portions of the novel that employ the personal frame
of referenceusually the first-person pronoun; shifting
sequences of time and place; negligible author interference;
fragmentary sentence structure; conscious activity of
which the character may or may not be aware; and discontinuity of thought at the prespeech level.
interior monologue;

(3) Indirect

indirect interior monologue is used

to designate such passages in a novel that employ the

second- or third-person pronoun; guidance by the author;
psychic content in the character's own idiom; which show

13
a level of consciousness nearer the surface, and even one
that illustrates a verbalized thought-level present,
though actually unuttered.

(4) Soliloquy:

the term

soliloguy is employed to indicate passages in stream-ofconsciousness fiction showing psychic activity with an
assumed audience, although the content is not spoken
verbally by the character; using the first-person pronoun,
and a nearly surface level of consciousness, with greater
coherence than the interior monologue, and v/ithout the
presence of the author.

(5) Omniscient description:

omniscient description, though a convention of older forms

of fiction, is also applicable in a special v/ay to streamof-consciousness writing as a technique for describing the
psychic content of a character in the author's words,
v/ritten in the third person.

The fundamental difference

betv/een omniscient description and interior monologue is

that the latter is directly to the reader from the consciousness of the character whereas the former comes to
the reader through the voice of the author.
In association v/ith the basic techniques tentatively defined above, there are three devices v/hich v/ill
be employed in this study:
variable chronology.

free association, montage, and

The first of these is the psycho-

logical process by v/hich a character's consciousness

simply drifts from one thing to another because of some

14
random connection between thema similarity, a contrast,
an imaginary parallel.

As well as movement of the psyche

in response to a particular thought, this device may also

indicate physical movement of the character, responding
to external stimuli.

The second device, montage, refers

either to external objects or inner thoughts which follow

the principles of cinematic presentation of panoramic
views, slow-ups, close-ups, and a series of views in rapid
succession.

This device is both useful in showing physical

movement of a character and the quality and rate of psychic

activity.

The third device consists of a variation of

time from its chronological sequence.

This variation may

involve compression or expansion, depending on the conisness being presented; or one time may be superimpc
sciousness
superimposed
upon another; or there may be side digressions, forward
movement into the future, or memory, within memory.

Such

inner time contrasts sharply with external or temporal

time, and the contrast is a valuable means of depicting
the flow of conscious activity.
Other means employed extensively by stream-of"" consciousness writers and recognized in the study as
specific devices of the method

are sensory impression,

.most often expressed in imagistic form; symbols, which

usually form patterns of cross-references as a structural
framework; and mechanical devices.

These mechanical aids

15
are used to help the reader identify a change in time, a
different level of consciousness, or a different quality
of thought.

Some of these aids are italics, dashes,

parentheses, lacunae, fragmentary sentence structure, lack

of standard capitalization and paragraph indention, and
special applications of conventional punctuation.
Stream-pf-consciousness writing has made a permanent contribution to the world of literature and it is
still v/idely employed today, though certainly in many
variations and degrees.

Friedman maintains that stream-

of-consciousness fiction was abandoned after 1930,

especially in America (p. 254). Edel believes that since
the publication of Finnegan's Wakethe supreme and ultimate
rendition of the stream-of-consciousness novel"there
seems to be only a retracing of steps, a return to earlier
forms, a reworking and perhaps intensification of earlier
material" (p. 202). But, later in the same work, he admits
that "there are signs among the younger writers of further
refinement of techniques and a moulding of the stream of
consciousness to nev; uses as well as integration of it
into the older type of narrative fiction" (p. 214). Paul
West, in his very recent book. The Modern Novel, says that
the stream-of-consciousness mode is used by the novelists
who depict "the anti-hero who now typifies powerless.

16
antisocial man"; and that it "has been renewed in significance by novelists who have lost faith in society and
therefore also in the novel as social portraiture" (p. xii) .
Since, however, the thought process we term stream of
consciousness-is inadequate as a structural device for
an entire novel, he continues, because it is only one part
38
of our mental structure,

it may be that the continued

use of the method will be found in those novels which

demonstrate "something basic in the nature of fiction:
the need for surface action and external reality to make
39
VThole reality as man knows it.
The use of the stream-of-consciousness technique
in American fiction has been, from the start, a departure
from that used by James Joyce.

American innovations in-

clude the use of more than one consciousness in a novel;

the addition of external action in a unified plot; and
the frequent combination of stream-of-consciousness techniques with the traditional forms of the novel.

One must

look to William Faulkner as the first writer in American

fiction to use the stream of consciousness.

Although

Faulkner wrote many of his works after the supposed decline

of stream of consciousness, continued study of his works
38
West, Modern, p. 12.
39
Humphrey, Stream, p. 119.

17
has shovm the presence of this method, combined with some
external action, in varying degrees in his fiction:

in

As I Lay Dying, "Old Man," and "The Bear," as well as in

the earlier work. The Sound and the Fury.

Other exponents

among current American writers of some form of the streamof-consciousness techniqueand employing "surface action
and external reality" as wellare such v/riters as John
Updike, Saul Bellow, and William Styron, who, because of
the representative nature of their stream-of-consciousness
technique, have been chosen, along v/ith Faulkner, to
illustrate its use in modern American fiction.

Faulkner's

pioneer effort in The Sound and the Fury in effect establishes the method as a standard element in modern American
experimental fiction.

Only a very brief survey will be

made of Faulkner's contribution, however, because of the

large body of critical effort already expended on the v/orks
listed above.

CHAPTER I
ANOTHER LOOK AT FAULKNER
William Faulkner, as recognized by the majority
of critics, holds an important place in American fiction.
Sometimes accused of being grandiose and rhetorical, or
2
of failing to provide judgment upon his materials, or
of making his fictional world more ambiguous and complex
3
than the real one, Faulkner, nevertheless, has been re4
garded as an important innovator, one willing to make new
5
explorations of material and method.
The Sound and the Fury (1929), now considered an
American classic, employs the techniques of the stream
of consciousness, but it also contains an important element
of plot, which had not been previously used in novels
employing the stream-of-consciousness technique.

The plot.

Maxv/ell Geismar, American Moderns: From Rebellion

to Conformity (New York, 1958), p. 97.
2
Booth, Rhetoric, p. 397.
"^Waltern Slatoff, Quest for Fai^lure: A Study of
William Faulkner (1960), in The Turn of the Novel by Alan
Freidman (New York, 1966), p. 183.
William Van O'Connor, William Faulkner (University
of Minnesota, 1965), p. 12.
Robert Penn Warren as quoted by O'Connor in
Faulkner, p. 11.
18

19
briefly, presents the disintegration of an old Southern
family as seen in the last generation of the Compsons,
represented in the four children;

Quentin, the eldest

son, sent to Harvard on the proceeds of the sale of the

last few acres of Compson land, seeking to reconcile the
past and the present into some sort of viable future, can
find an answer only in suicide. Caddy, the beautiful
daughter, loving and yet hating her family, seeking an
answer to life, resorts to promiscuity, bears an illegitimate child (also named Quentin), and is finally seenin
Jason's eyes at leastas an international tramp.

The

youngest son is Benjy, who is an idiot, cared for at home

until he is thirty-eight years old, at which time he is
committed by his brother Jason to the state asylum.

Jason--

avaricious, egoistic, and vicious, is the "rational" middle

son who assumes a managerial responsibility for the family,
but this responsibility is both a cause and an effect of
the total disintegration of the family as he, too, becomes
a victim of his o\>m depravity.

The family, as such, re-

mains only in the mind of Dilseythe old Negro woman

(family matriarch in her private world) who seems to
represent the nimbus of flowing timelessness.
The^story of the decline of the Compson family,
and, by extension, the decline of the old South, is told
in four sections, each focused upon the daughter, Candace

20
(Caddy), who is seen only through the consciousness of the
others.

Three of the four sections use the interior

monologue, while the fourth, or Dilsey section, is told

from an omniscient point of view.

The first section is

devoted to the consciousness of Benjy, a thirty-threeyear-old idiot.

The section clearly qualifies as a direct

interior monologue, representing as it does the psychic

content and processes just as they exist before they are
formulated for deliberate speech.

As a matter of fact,

Benjy is unable to speak, being forced to communicate

"by howling, moaning, or remaining placid."

The monologue

ranges in time as far back as Benjy's memory can carry

him.

These memory scenes, sometimes very long, sometimes

only a flash within another memory, are triggered by

external stimuli, in the present, v/hich is April 7, 1928.
A brief passage may be used to illustrate the numerous
time shifts that occur in the Benjy section.

Luster is

speaking to Benjy:
'. , . You snagged on that nail again. Cant
you never crawl through here without snagging
on that nail.'
Caddy uncaught me and we crawled through.
Uncle Maury said to not let anybody see us,
so we better stoop over, Caddy said. Stoop
over, Benjy. Like this, see. . . . /ellipsis
mine/
Keep your hands in your pockets, Caddy said.

Edmond L. Volpe, A Reader's Guide to William

Faulkner (New York, 1964), p. 87.

21
Or they'll get froze. You don't want your
hands froze on Christmas, do you.
*It's too cold out there.' Versh said.
^
'You dont want to go out doors.' (pp. 24-25).
There are three time levels used in this short selection.
The first speech is Lester's in the present; the snagging
of himself on the nail reminds Benjy of the time he and
Caddy had carried a message for Uncle Maury to Mrs.
Patterson; which in turn reminds him of a time v/hen Caddy
made a remark about his freezing his hands.

This memory

expands into that time before Christmas when Caddy was

still in school.

This last time is broadly the same as

that in the italics, but the specific scene it evokes is

one in which he is waiting for her at the gate.
A fev/ examples of the process of association which
triggers Benjy's memory of past scenes may indicate the
extensive use made of this psychological element at its
fundamental level. Luster takes off Benjy's shoes so that
he can wade; the water reminds him of the time Caddy and
the others v/ere playing in the branch and she got her
dress wet (p. 37). The golfer calls his caddie and Benjy
begins to moan over the loss of his Caddy (p. 73). Dilsey
accuses Luster of allowing Benjy to upset Miss Quentin by
7
William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (New
York, 1946). This and all subsequent page references
to this book are taken from the Vintage Books edition.

22
simply being near her and then sets Benjy down in front
of the fire; the reminder that he is not wanted and the
sight of the fire remind him of the time his mother became
so disturbed about him and his name change and Caddy took
him away to the kitchen and comforted him (pp. 74-75).
Many of the memory scenes are told in fragments,
being continued later despite the interposition of outer
action and even of other memories.

Such a method may at

first seem unnecessarily obscure and frustrating, but one

should remember that it is the chaotic consciousness of
an idiot that is being presented.
The second section, belonging to Quentin, is also
in the form of a continuous interior monologue.

It is

much nearer the standard form of the stream-of-consciousness

method, characterized by discontinuity, privacy, lack of
inhibition, free associations (associations of an order
more sophisticated than those in the Benjy section), and
lack of punctuation and formal syntax.

A short quotation,

as follows, may illustrate this more complex type of

monologue:
It's not for kissing I slapped you. Girl's
elbows a^t fifteen Father said you swallow like
you had a fishbone in your throat what's the
matter with you and Caddy across the table not
to look at me. It's for letting it be some darn
town squirt I. slapped you you will will you nov/
I guess you say calf rope. My red hand coming
up out of her face. What do you think of that
scouring her head into the. Grass sticks

23
crisscrossed into the flesh tingling scouring
her head. Say calf rope say it (p. 152).
It may be noted that this passage is in italics, which
are used generally in this part to relive past scenes.
The present time of this section, dated June 2, 1910,
contains monologues of even more discontinuity.

Two

excerpts, each from a much longer passage, may show this

level of consciousness, which is much nearer the center
than Benjy's;
. . . she stood there her eyes like cornered
rats then I was running in the grey darkness
it smelled of rain and all flov/er scents the
damp warm air released and crickets sawing
away in the grass pacing me with a small
- travelling island of silence Fancy watched me
across the fence blotchy like a quilt on a
line I thought damn that nigger he forgot to
feed her again . . . (p. 168)
Just by imagining the clump it seemed to me
that I could hear whispers secret surges smell
the beating of hot blood under wild unsecret
flesh watching against red eyelids the swine
untethered in pairs rushing coupled into the
sea and he we must just stay awake and see evil
done for a little while its not always and i it
doesnt have to be even that long for a man of
courage and he do you consider that courage
. . . (p. 195).
The latter excerpt shows much greater incoherence, but its
inchoateness is in keeping with its position in this entire
section as the last entry into the inner recesses of
Quentin's mind.
The Quentin section, like that devoted to Benjy,
combines the psychic content with external action.

The

24
outer events actually are few in number but are detailed,
covering his actions on the day he commits suicide.

Such

minute accounting for his actions provides a tangible

framework for the continuous and erratic flow of
consciousness.
Another type of monologue is to be found in the
third section, which belongs to Jason.

In keeping v/ith

his character, Jason's narration is much more coherent

and "sane," but it is also very self-revealing.

There is

a great deal of external action involving directly other

characters who, until now, have been seen only through the
consciousnesses of Benjy and Quentin.

A portion, with

ellipses inserted, of a passage typical of the revealing

nature of this section is given below:
Well, Jason likes work. I says no I never
had university advantages because at Harvard
they teach you how to go for a- swim at night
v/ithout knowing how to swim and at Sev/anee
they dont even teach you what water is. I says
you might send me to the state University; maybe
1*11 learn how to stop my clock with a nose
spray and then you can send Ben to the Navy I
says or to the cavalry anyway, they use geldings
in the cavalry. Then when she sent Quentin home
for me to feed too . . . I says . . .It's
your grandchild, which is more than any other
grandparents it's got can say for certain. Only
I says it's only a question of time. If you
believe she'll do what she says and not try to
see it, you fool yourself because the first time
that was that Mother kept on saying thank God
you are not a Compson except in name, because
you are all I have left now, you and Maury, and
I says well I could spare Uncle Maury myself
and then they came and said they were ready to
start. . . . (pp. 312-214).

25
As one can see, this monologue depicts a level of consciousness much nearer the surface than those of either
Benjy or Quentin.

That he is shallow, selfish, envious,

and mean is quickly made clear.

This section also is a

combination of -psychic content, mixed time elements, and

external action.

A number of questions are answered, or

clues to the answers are given, as Jason gives his subjective versions of the past.
The last section of the novel focuses on Dilsey,
but the account is an exterior one told from an omniscient
point of view.

Perhaps this point of view is used to

emphasize the objectivity with which Dilsey is able to

view the Compson family.
In addition to the use of interior monologues,
free association, and complex time, the wealth of sensory
images and the cross-reference of symbols enrich the
experience of the novel.

The most important symbols include

time, v/ater, and honeysuckle, especially notable in the

Quentin section, but also appearing in other sections.
All of these techniques are used extensively in this novel,
the archetype of stream-of-consciousness fiction in
America.
A later novel. As I. Lay Dying (1930), also makes
use of one of the techniques of stream of consciousness.
This technique consists of a special form of monologue

26
sometimes designated as soliloquy, and is the only form
of narration used throughout the novel.

The individual

soliloquies are connected by the content of plot action

which they also reflect.
The plot concerns the actions of the Bundren famj-ly
and a few others.

The mother Addle is dying and in order

to carry out the promise to bury her in Jefferson, a coffin

is constructed by Cash, and after her death, the family
start out for Jefferson.

On the way, many hazards delay

the journey, among them fire, flood, and pestilence in the

fojrm of buzzards.

The account of the trip reveals other

problems as well:

Dewey Dell, the unmarried but pregnant

daughter, tries to buy abortion pills but is seduced by

the druggist's clerk instead; Darl seems to go mad; and
the husband Anse, after burying Addie, steals Devjey Dell's
money, buys himself a set of new teeth, and finds a nev/
wife.

Jewel,. Vardaman, and Cash, the other three children,

are last seen simply waiting placidly in the v/agon for

Anse and his new wife.
There are fifteen characters v/ho have soliloquies;
seven of them are Bundrens and the other eight are various
outsiders.

Two of the outsiders are neighbors, Cora and

Vernon Tull; one is the doctor, Peabody; and one is the

Preacher Whitfield, v/ho is the father of Jevzel.

Samson

is. a storekeeper, Armstid is a neighbor v/ho helps them.

27
Moseley is the druggist, and MacGowan is the clerk who
seduces Dewy Dell; all of these people outside the family
have one section each.

Of the family members. Jewel and

Addie have one short section each, though Addie's is the

center of meaning; Anse has three sections; Dewey Dell,
four; Cash, five; Vardaman, ten, and Darl, nineteen.
According to Humphrey, who counts only thirteen soliloquies,
the large number of consciousnesses used is a quite
8
original application of the stream-of-consciousness method.
Each monologue of the family members serves as a means of
characterizing that person, and the monologues of the outsiders serve either to enforce or counterpoint these
revelations, or to show a different perspective of events.
According to Volpe, there are three levels of diction
used:

"a realistic dialect records actual speech; a more

formal diction records conscious thought, and a poetic

9
imagistic language indicates uncontrolled thought."
The
following excerpt, from one of Dewey Dell's monologues,
will seorve to illustrate these three levels.

Ellipses

have been added.

'We'll leave you here, then. Lessen you
behave, we will leave you. Go on, now, before
that old green-eating tub of guts eats everything up from you.' He goes on, disappearing
slowly into the hill. The crest, the trees.

Humphrey, Stream, p. 105.

9
Volpe, Faulkner, p. 128.

28
the roof of the house stand agains the sky.
The cow nuzzles at me, moaning, . . . He
could fix it all right, if he just would.
And he dont even knov/ it. He could do everything for me if he just knowed it. . . . The
sky lies flat down the slope, upon the secret
clumps. Beyond the hill sheet-lightning stains
upward and fades. The dead air shapes the dead
earth in the dead darkness, further away than
seeing shapes the dead earth. . . . I said
You dont know what worry is. I dont know what
it is. I dont know whether I am worrying or
not. . . (p. 61).10
The first speech shows her habitual idiom and refers to
Doctor Peabody.

The next two sentences record her sight

perceptions v/ithout being put into words. Then following

the first ellipsis, idiomatic speech is again used, though
thi^s time it is unuttered.

This speech is followed by

lines showing a poetic quality, reflecting her undirected

perceptions, and the last part beginning with "I said"
is the more formal diction of conscious thought.
Examination of a monologue by Darl shows these
same levels, although the segment of actual speech is
fairly limiteda factor which, of course, is in keeping
with his character.

An excerpt follows;

Let Jewel take the end of the rope and

cross upstream of us and brace it,' I say.
Will you do that, Jev/el?'
Jewel watches me hard. He looks quick at
Cash. . . . /Ellipses are itiine^
'Let's do that. Cash,* I say.

William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying, Vintage Books

edition. Subsequent page references are from this edition

29
*I reckon we'll have to,' Cash says.
The river itself is not a hundred yards
across, and pa and Vernon and Vardaman and
Dewey Dell are the only things in sight not of
that single monotony of desolation leaning
with that terrific quality a little from right
to left, as though we had reached a the place
where the motion of the wasted world accelerates
just before the final precipice. Yet they
appear dwarfed. It is as though the space
between us were time: an irrevocable quality.
. . . (p. 139).
Just as actual ,speech is limited in Darl's sections, so
is uncontrolled thought, since Darl's thoughts usually
reflect his intelligence and awareness.

However, these

portions are frequently poetic in tone, with the images

somewhat more elaborate and sophisticated than those of
the other characters.

The last section, devoted to him

gives indications of his continued keenness of observation,

but there is also apparent the inability to communicate,
as previously noted (pp. 243-44).
Many other examples of monologues could be cited,
but since this fojrm is used exclusively, the foregoing
may show their individuality and the typical levels of
language.

Although not exemplified in the above quoted

passages, Faulkner's methods of fragmenting the story and

of moving backward and forward in time are also used in
this novel.

The plot, involving a number of events, is

revealed piecemeal in each section; hov/ever, there is less

transposition of chronological events found in this novel

30
than in the complex movement in The Sound and the Fury.
This interweaving of external action into the consciousnesses of fifteen characters and the restriction of narration to one technique only make this novel unique in
stream-of-consciousness fiction.
Experiments with time and the use of external action
in presenting the pscychic processes on various levels of
consciousness are, however, evident in many of Faulkner's
other works.

A brief look at two of his short novels,

one v/ritten ten years after the monumental The Sound and
the Fury and the other, thirteen years later, give abundant
proof of Faulkner's continued application of the streamof-consciousness techniques in his own original fashion.
In the first of these. The Wild Palms (1939), Faulkner
has used an unusual form of consciousness in relating the
experience of the Tall Convict in the second story of the
book entitled "Old Man."

The Wild Palms was originally

published with the tv/o storiesthe title story and "Old

Man"presented in alternating sections from each one,
but later publications have separated the two, and now
many readers regard "Old Man" as a short novel in itself.
It will be so treated in the follov/ing brief discussion.
The setting of the story is a prison in Mississippi
and the Mississippi Riveri.e., the "Old Man"in flood
stage in May of 1927. The protagonist, never given a

31
name, is the tall convict who is seirving a fifteen-year
sentence for attempted train robbery, the plans for which
he had based on his reading of detective magazines and
other such pulp fiction.

The second convictwho serves,

among other things, as an anchor to the prison as far as

narrative technique goesis serving a sentence of a
hundred and ninety-nine years for some unknown crime involving robbery' and a woman.

It is through the latter's

reading of the newspapers that the inmates first begin to

learn of the growing flood.

The convicts are called out

in guarded squads to help control the flood by working on

levees and aiding in rescues.

The tall one and the short

convict are sent out in the morning to rescue a woman

sitting in a cypress snag and a man on the roof of a
cotton house.

But their boat is sv/amped and overturned

and the two convicts are separated.. The short convict

and the man on the roof are brought back to the levee by
the deputy v/arden, where the short convict reports that
the tall one must have drowned.
The main burden of the narrative, then, is focused
on the tall convict, who has not drowned but who has
managed to retain the paddle and shortly retrieves the
skiff.

Carried and swirled by the raging current, his

boat happens to strike the clump of cypress trees where

the woman whom they were sent to rescue is perched.

32
Intending to find his partner, the short convict, and to
rescue the man on the roof, the tall one gets the woman,
who is obviously near the last stages of pregnancy, and
they set outbut under the river's control, not under
their own power.. Recognizing a stretch of the river, the
convict plans to head for the nearest town, any town,
where he can "surrender his charge . . . and turn his
back on her forever . . . and return to that monastic
existence of shotguns and shackles" (p. 110).11 They
undergo many harrowing experiencesnear-drownings, hunger,
birth of the baby, snake-infested islandsand all the
time they must struggle with the power of the river.
During this time he learns to accept her as his responsibility and to keep in mind his goal of returning the skiff
and himself to the prison.

In order to accomplish these

aims, he takes different short-term jobs, among the more

bizarre being the killing of alligators.

After some seven

weeks, he manages to hire a launch to take him and the

woman, with the skiff in tow, to a place where he can
surrender, once again dresse-d, deliberately, in his penitentiary clothing.

To the awkward deputy he says, "'Yonder's

This page reference is taken from the Vintage

Books edition of Three Famous Short Novels by William
Faulkner, copyright 1939; subsequent references are to
this same edition.

33
your boat, and here's the woman.

But I never did find

that bastard on the cottonhouse'" (p. 172). He is returned to prison where, for political purposes about v/hich
he neither knows nor cares, the authorities add ten years
to his sentence for "'attempted escape'" (p. 177).
The structure of the story is the flashback account
of his experiences related to his bunkmates in the prison.
The first section of the story is concerned with an
omniscient account, compressed in the telling to only a
few pages (eight out of the total number of one hundred
eight) , of hov/ he and the short convict came to be in
prison, and to the necessary information about the flood.
Transition now being made to the scene where the two convicts are sent on their rescue mission, the real story is
then related from the consciousness of the tall convict,
with fairly frequent reminders of the present through
direct statements, such as, "This is hov/ he told about it
seven weeks later . . . on his bunk in the barracks"
(p. 114); by interruptions from the short convict in the
form of questions or comments; or by less noticeable phrases
inserted in the midst of narration, such as "he remembered
it."

These three elements suggest a third-person point

of view, and the author's voice speaking, or that of the

omniscient narrator.

But it is the consciousness of the

convict that makes up the real story.

The events which

34
he recounts are, in themselves, interesting only to a very
limited degree and would hold little meaning without the
interpretation v/hich his perceptions give to them.
The form used to relate his inner experiences
while he is living the external experiences assumes a form
of the indirect interior monologue, modified and combined
with omniscient description.

Any objection that the con-

vict is orally recounting the experiences to his cell

mates and thus cannot be interior is quickly seen as
pointless because what the story reveals is much more than
what he tells his listeners, or what he thinks, for that
matter, since the reader learns things, despite the convict's innate knowledge of them, that even the convict
cannot verbalize.

The follov/ing passage may be helpful

in illustrating how such information is conveyed.

The

convict returns to the shack, the shelfer for the last few
days of hunting alligators of himself and the Cajun, where
he sees some men waiting:
. . . Turning to the woman again, his mouth
already open to repeat as the dreamy buzzing
voice of the man came to him and he turning
once more, in a terrific and absolutely unbearable exasperation, crying, 'Flood? What
flood? Hell a mile, it's done passed me tv/ice
months agol It's gonel What flood?' and then
(he did not think this in actual words either
but he knew it, suffered that flashing insight
into his ov/n character or destiny: hov/ there
was a peculiar quality of repetitiveness about
his present fate, how not only the almost seminal
crises recurred with a certain monotony, but

35
the very physical circumstances followed a
stupidly unimaginative pattern) the man in
the launch said, 'Take him' . . . (p. 166).
Here, one can see how the depths of his consciousness is
revealed but, obviously, not in his words.

These are the

author's; the feelings are the character's, yet the experience never reaches the speech level of his consciousness
and cannot be related audibly to his listeners.

The

passage thus qualifies as indirect interior monologue

because it is of such a private nature, but the nature of
the convict is such that this privacy must be described
in another's words, namely the author's, and in this manner,
the passage is, of necessity, modified by omniscient
description.
A special element of time, apparent in this same
passage, demands consideration.

As indicated earlier,

the major portion of the material, in which the central

story is revealed, is told obstensibly as a flashback.
Since, however, so much more than the events is also given,
it is possible that the material comes from either of two
sources:

his feeling experienced at the time of narration,

or the feeling experienced at the time of occurrence.

Probably a more accurate assessment is that much of this
material stems from parts of both timesthe response is
registered and the analysis is applied later.

36
In contrast to the above, many of the longer
passages are much more easily seen to qualify as a form of
interior monologue in combination with omniscient description.

These are nearly always connected to external action,

an innovation-in the stream-of-consciousness technique

which is attributed to Faulkner.'^ A passage of this
nature arising from external action, clearly shown to be
so by the inclusion of people other than the v/oman, occurs
near the end of the story being related by the convict
to the prisoners.

In the incident from which the passage

comes, the convict and the woman have been taken to an

armory serving as a shelter for the flood victims. At
the woman's suggestion that he lie to the guard in order
get out of the armory and back on his way to return to
prison, his reaction is shown in the following passage,
with ellipses added.
And how ha did not; he could not have expressed
this either, it too deep, too ingrained; he
had never yet had to think it into v/ords through
all the long generations of himselfhis hillman' s sober and jealous respect not for truth
but for the pov/er, the strength, of lying
not to be niggard with lying but rather to use
it with respect and even care, delicate quick
and strong, like a fine and fatal blade. And
how they fetched him clothes . . . (a brisk
starched young woman saying, 'But the baby
must be bathed, cleaned. It will die if you
dont,' and the woman saying, *Yessum. He

12
Humphrey, Stream, p. 121.

37
might holler some, he ain't never been bathed
before. But he's a good baby.') and now it
v/as night . . . and he rising, gripping the
woman awake, and then the v/indow. He told that;
how there v/ere doors in plenty . . . 'You ought
to tore up a sheet and slid down it,' the plump
convict said. . . . nor did he tell, any more
than about the sixty-foot levee, hov/ he got
the skiff back into the water (p. 170) .
The above quotation, lengthy as it.is, constitutes only a
portion of the entire passage (v/hich runs for more than
two pages in one unbroken paragraph), but there are a
number of things included that are v/orthy of attention;
first, his reasons for not taking advantage are shov/n to
be below the level of vrebalization; second, his consciousness is presented as fully sentient without verbalization;
third, the interior and exterior actions are shown as
simultaneously occurring, and fourth, the instrusion of
the short convict's speech keeps the reader attached to the
convict-narrator in the present.

The last part quoted,

after the last ellipsis, indicates one of the many things

he does not tell his listeners, a reseirve which clearly
builds reader-sympathy for the character.

An additional

notev/orthy item is the material enclosed in parentheses

(parentheses, incidentally, are used with great frequency
throughout) revealing not only humor, which is such an
integrated element in this story, but also pointing out
what mast be the narrator's private memories and impressions
which are on the verablized level but are not spoken.

38
along with further ramifications of character revelation
and background detail.
The following passage shows still a different
combination of levels.

This technique is a form of interior

monologue akin .to the direct form; however, it does not

show the discontinuity normally exhibited in the direct
interior monologue, perhaps because of the brevity.

The

excerpt is from a longer portion concerning the alligatorhunting episode:

He told itof the next eight or nine or
ten days . . . He did not tell it that v/ay,
just as he apparently did not consider it worth
the breath to tell how he had got the . . .
skiff single-handed up and do\-m and across the
sixty-foot levee. He just said, 'After a while
v/e come to a house and we stayed there eight
or nine days then they blew up the levee with
dynamite so v/e had to leave.' That was all.
But he remembered it, but quietly now, with the
cigar now, the good one the Warden had given him
(though not lighted yet) in his peaceful and
steadfast hand, remembering that first morning
when he v/aked on the thin pallet beside his
host (the woman and baby and the one bed) with
the fierce sun already latticed through the
warped rough planking of the wall, and stood
on the rickety porch looking out upon that flat
fecund waste neither earth nor water, where
even the senses doubted which was which, which
rich and massy air and v/hich mazy and impalpable
vegetation, and thought quietly. He must do
something here to eat and live. But I. dont
knov/ v/hat. And until I_ can go on again, until
I. can find where I. am and how to pass that tovm
without them seeing me I will have to help him
do it .so we can eat and live too, and I. dont
know what. (p. 150).
One can imiiediately recognize the sparsity of what he tells
and the density of what he withholds.

The italicized

39
section at the close of the excerpt illustrates the modified interior monologue, clearly in his idiom, using the
first person, and although verbalized, not designed to be
spoken.

There is also a triple-layered time element to

be considered:

the present in the prison, the immediate

past in the Warden's office, and the time of his memory

with its double level of consciousness.
An interesting complication of the time element,
following the distortion of chronology quite often found
in stream-of-consciousness writing, can be shown by a very
short example.

Relating the alligator episode, the con-

vic't mentions going "halvers" with the Cajun, and the short
convict intervenes with a question:
'How could you make a business agreement
v/ith a man you claim you couldn't even
talk to?'
*I never had to talk to him,* the tall one
said. 'Money aint got but one- language' (p. 152).
Then somewhat later, he is thinking of the return boat
trip after his first kill, v/hen he looked at the bloody
skin and thought;
And I. cant even ask him how much my half will be.
But this not for long either, because as he
was to tell the plump convict later, money has
but one language. He remembered that too (they
were at home now. . . . *I done seem to got
to where if that boy v/as to shoot me in the
tail v/ith a bean blower my nose would bleed.')
remembered that too but he did not try to tell
it (p. 156).

40
At first glance, the time mentioned in both parts of the
passage seems simple enough, but upon closer examination,
its multiple complexity emerges.
One other form of the direct monologue used by
Faulkner in "The Old Man" may be mentioned; however, there
is only one instance of it, and a very short one at that:
a brief dream sequence in which he dreams of the prison,
of being cold and wet, and of the mule with which he used
to plow, that now in his dream gives him a long swipe
across his face; he awakes to find himself lying in four
inches of v/ater and snakes crawling everywhere, including
over his ov/n body (p. 136) .
A great deal of the narration is not clearly
interior monologue or omniscient description, but consists
of frequent phrases, especially those conveying images,
which are couched in words that stem from his consciousness.

A few examples, chosen at random, may show this

effective description:

"the unfinished paddle of the

color and texture of sooty bricks, like something gnav/ed

out of an old chimney by beavers and weighing twenty-five
pounds" (p. 137); the talk of the Louisiana people as
"'gobble-gobble, whang, cav/-caw-to-to'" (p. 139); the steamboat moving "like a ant crossing a plate" (p. 143); and
the alligator hide that "had belonged to something larger
than any calf or hog" (p. 153). The numerous images

41
referring to animals and insects are in keeping with the
simple, primitive nature of the convict; these images occur
in those passages phrased in his language as well as in
those using the author's words, which describe the convict's psychic processes.
Almost the entire short novel may be said to
describe the consciousness of the tall convict except for
the first section, which, as has been noted (p. 33), is
an impersonal "history" of the two convicts and a preparation for the action to follow, and another short section, about five and a half pages, near the end, when the
narration moves away from the consciousness of the central
character.

This latter passage takes place in the Warden's

office and concerns the problem which the convict's return

has caused.

As soon as he is brought in to hear his sen-

tence, the narration again focuses on him.

Certainly

there is to be found the integration of external action

and interior processes, and though he tells his fellow
convicts what has happened externally, the author presents
to the reader what occurred internally as v/ell. In doing
this, Faulkner has employed modified forms of interior
monologue and omniscient description.

Little use has been

made of the device of free association, perhaps because

the experience is told from a retrospective point of view.
However, this retrospective angle allov/s for a great deal

42
of complexity in the handling of time, with the reader
aware of several layers at once.

All of these techniques

have combined to present a character who first appears

somev/hat foolish and unattractive, to say the least, but
who gains in stature and dignity as the stoiry unfolds until,
at the last, one is fully cognizant of his courage, modesty,
integrity, and simplicity.
This partial and limited analysis of the narrative
techniques employed has, it is to be hoped, shown Faulkner's
originality in adapting the stream-of-consciousness methods
and applying them in new ways.
The second short novel in question, originally
published as one of the seven interrelated stories in
Go Down, Moses, and now frequently published separately,
is "The Bear."

In this v/ork, Faulkner has also adapted

the techniques of stream-of-consciousness writing, manipulating the time element in an involved manner, using
monologues in the form of memory sequences piled upon
other memories as though lived in the present, amassing
sensory experiences perceived through one consciousness,
^and employing the Joycean epiphany as the center of meaning
of the whole novel.

These techniques are combined to

. relate the story of Isaac McCaslin in his efforts to reach

maturity, both in the external world and the inner world
of the heart.

43
Told in the form of reminiscence, the novel recounts
Ike's experiences on his hunting trips into the v/ilderness
which culminate in the killing of Old Ben, the bear, and
the end of the wilderness.

He visits the woods one last

time after the lumber rights have been sold; later he

gives up his patrimony in his efforts to reach an understanding of the relationship of the individual, society,
and nature.
Not allowed to go on the semi-annual hunting trips
until he can write his age in two figures, Ike learns to be
both a master woodsman and hunter with the help of Sam
Fathers, part Indian, part Negro, and part white.

On his

first trip when he is ten, the most rewarding experience

occurs when he senses the presence of Old Ben, the symbol
of the ancient wilderness untainted by society.

On

successive hunts he learns more and more about being a true

woodsman, and his hunting skill increases until he is able,
at the age of twelve, to kill his first buck, for which
Sam Fathers marks his face with blood, symbolic of the
puberty ritual, physical and spiritual.

His knowledge of

the wilderness continues to increase, and when he is sixteen,

he is one of the group that v/itnesses the death of Old
Ben, killed by the inept Boon, who wants to save the
powerful dog Lion, trained by Sam but cared for by Boon.
At Old Ben's death, which means the end of the wilderness

44
to Major de Spain as well as to Ike and Sam, Sam Fathers
and the dog Lion both die and are buried in a remote spot
in the woods.

The next year Major de Spain sells the lumber

rights except for a small section enclosing the burial

plots.

Ike makes one more hunt, but he is forced to admit

what has long been apparent:

that the encroachment of

society, represented by the logging train, will temporarily

destroy the wilderness, thus preventing man from returning
to his essential nature, which is to be found in the fundamental patterns of nature itself.

Recognizing the crime

against humanity committed by his grandfather and his own

society, he repudiates his heritage at the age of twenty-one
in an effort to live by the code of nature; he tries to
trace his grandfather's children of Negro blood in order
to turn over the legacies which had been set up for them,
but he is only partly successful, just as he only partially
succeeds in his personal attempts to fuse social man and
natural man in his own life.
Structurally, the novel is divided into five sections,
told from Ike's memory when he is over seventy years old
(though for proof of this the next story in the complete
book, "Delta Autumn," must be taken into consideration;
moreover, there are also several scenes in the "The Bear"
which are told in detail in an earlier story, "The Old
People," the fourth in the collection Go Down, Moses).

45
The first two sections are devoted to the five hunts,
from v/hen Ike is ten to the time he is sixteen, during
which he first feels the bear's presence and the power of
the wilderness; sees the bear for the first time; kills
his first honorable game; tracks Old Ben and is forced to
grab the fyce to keep Old Ben from killing it; witnesses
the training of Lion, and the attempts of the hunting party
to kill Old Ben, especially Boon's futile effort of
shooting at Old Ben, and missing all five times.

The

third section is a detailed account of the last hunt for

Old Ben, when Lion brings him to bay and is saved from
immediate death by Boon (who kills Old Ben with his knife).
The fourth section is out of chronological, though in
proper thematic, order in taking up the account of Ike's
repudiation of his patrimony when he is twenty-one, and his
memory of two years before attempti.ng to trace the Negro
heirs of his grandfather, and of a later time and the
failure of his marriage because he refuses his wife's
demand that he claim "the farm." The fifth section returns
in time to when he is eighteen, when he makes one last
trip to the wilderness before the lumber company moves in.
The novel ends on the note that runs throughout the whole:
man's futile attempts, represented in Boon's frenzied
commands about the squirrels, to possess the wilderness.

46
Faulkner again has moved time backward and forward
in presenting the story, and again the reader is required
to assort and relate the episodes into an overall pattern
and yet retain the narrative pattern in order to comprehend
the total significance of the novel.

In general, the novel

covers events which occur from the time Ike is ten until
after he is twenty-one, but this time is extended on
occasion to far' into the past and even into the future to
a time when he is over eighty, v/ith implications of events
of an even remoter time. As noted earlier, the sections
themselves are not chronological, the last tv/o sections
being transposed, but there is even greater disruption of
the temporal flow of time within each section.

For example.

Part I begins when he is sixteen, but within a short space

the narration returns to the time of his first hunting
trip when he is ten.

Such a flashback seems normal enough,

but a closer look reveals that there is a third layer of

time to be taken into accountthat of his memory before
he is ten, when the wilderness "ran in his knowledge before
he ever saw it" (p. 187) 13 and when he was "still a child,
with three years then two years then one year yet before
he too could make one of them" (p. 188). Within this

13
William Faulkner, Three Famous Short Novels (New
York, 1940); Vintage edition. This and subsequent page
references to "The Bear" are taken from this edition.

47
same section he remembers the time when he was eleven and
actually saw Old Ben for the first time (p. 198 and p. 202),
and then the future is also brought in when he compares
their surrey (when he is ten) in the wilderness to a boat
on the ocean-"after he /had/ seen the sea" (p. 189).
Additional complications of time are found in
greater complexity as the novel progresses.

Part II be-

gins with his memory of Lion, when he himself is thirteen.

But because of the processes of psychological association
and the discontinuity of memory, events must be realized
through a pastiche of a part of an event here, the recall
of an earlier event, and bits of others that he remembers
when he is eighty, and some of these memories may have
occurred at any time in the past.

In order to illustrate

the technique which Faulkner uses and which forces the

reader to be his own composer, the following passage is
quoted, with a liberal use of ellipses for the sake of
brevity;
So he should have hated and feared Lion. He
was thirteen then. He had killed his buck and
Sam Fathers had marked his face with the hot
blood, and in the next November he killed a
bear. But before that accolade he had become
as competent in the woods as many grown men
with the same experience. By now he was a better
woodsman than most grown men with more. . . .
In the third fall he found a buck's beddingplace by himself. . . .
By now he knew the old bear's footprint.
. . . Twice while on the stand during the next
three years he heard the dogs strike its trail

48
and once even jump it by chance. . . . Once,
still-hunting with Walter Ewell's rifle, he
saw it . . . /and/ he realized then v/hy it
would take a dog not only of abnormal courage
but size and speed too. . . . He had a little
dog . . . of the sort called fyce. . . . He
brought it with him one June. . . .
So he should have hated and feared Lion.
It was in -the fourth summer, the fourth time
he had made one in the celebration of Major de
Spain's and General Compson's birthday
(pp. 203-206 passim).
The first part ,of the above passage concerns a time intermediate between the two broad segments of events in Part I,
when he is sixteen and when he is ten.

The time mentioned

next is the time he kills the buck, at the age of twelve

(from information revealed at another place).

The phrase

"the next November" means the time.at twelve or thirteen

in the fall before the present summer tripnow at the
age of thirteen also.

The hunt with the fyce occurred in

June of the year he was apparently twelve years old.

The

major portion of Part II deals with the events of the

summer's trip during which he first sees Lion, the fall
trip when Lion trails Old Ben, and then the next November,
when Ike would be apparently fifteen, v/hen Lion bays Old
Ben but Boon is unable to hit him.

Such an interpretation

depends upon the reader's ability to find the clues and

bits of information scattered throughout all five sections.
In contrast. Part III is much more unified,
centered upon the killing of Old Ben, Lion's death, and

49
Sam's burial.

There are only two short digressions of any

importanceone concerning Boon's devotion to Ike, and the

other concerning an incident in Boon's past and his ineptness with a gun of any sort.

This straightforv/ard method

is obviously chosen to convey the importance which the

entire episode holds in Ike's memory, having become almost
ritualized, and holding the key to the turning point in
his life.
It is in the fourth section, however, that the
greatest amount of complexity is encountered.

Covering

nearly sixty pages, the narration concerns the evening

in October of the year that Ike is twenty-one (1888) as
he and McCaslin talk together in the storeroom where the
ledgers containing records of all the transactions concerning the slaveslater, the freed slavesare kept.
The time covered is expanded much beyond the confines of
one evening's conversation, ranging as it does from far
in the past that is reflected in the record of the ledgers
to indeterminate times between his age of twenty-one and
the eighty years he has reached at the time of the reminiscence.

Even universal time is considered as Ike tries

to explain to McCaslin his concept of history and of God's

plan.

Memory interferes v/ith memory, bits of their conver-

sation enter from time to time, and one moment's flash

may set off a train of events covering a year's time.

50
A selection showing a number of these time variations follows below.

Liberal use has again been made of

ellipses in order to emphasize the time element, but the

essential substance of the passage is retained.

Ike and

McCaslin have been speaking of the Civil War:

. . . This was chronicled in a harsher book
and McCaslin . . . had seen it . . . and the
boy himself had inherited it . . . that dark
corrupt and bloody time while three separate
peoples had tried to adjust . . . those upon
whom freedom and equality had been dumped
overnight . . . who misused it . . . so that he
thought Apparently there is a wisdom beyond
even that learned through suffering necessary
for a man to distinguish between liberty and
license; that race threefold in one . . .
composed of the sons of middle-aged Quartermaster
lieutenants and Army sutlers and contractors in
military blankets and shoes and transport mules
. . . and in another generation would be engaged
in a fierce economic competition . . . and in
the third generation would be back once more in
the little lost county seats . . . first in
mufti then later in actual formalized regalia
of hooded sheets and passwords and fiery
Christian symbols . . . and of all that other
nameless horde of speculators in human misery
. . . and the Jew . . . a pariah about the face
of the Western earth. . . . McCaslin had actually
seen it, and the boy even at almost eighty would
never be able to distinguish certainly between
what he had seen and what had been told him.
. . . and this time McCaslin . . . merely lifted
one hand . . . toward the desk . . . the ledgers
. . . among which the old names . . . were lost
Tomey's Terrel . . . Percival Brownlee . . . an
old man now and quite fat, as the well-to-do
proprietor of a select New Orleans brothel; and
Tennie's Jim . . . and Fonsiba in Arkansas with
her three dollars each month . . . and only
Lucas was left . . . whose name would not even
appear for six years yet . . . (pp.277-81).

51
Except for the beginning of the paragraph, not here quoted,
there is no interruption in Ike's flow of thought, ranging
in time from before his birth to events which have not
happened yet at the time of the conversation.
Other passages of similar nature could be taken from
almost any part of this long fourth section to show the
piled up time layers, many of them clues to events that
have been recordedin partearlier in the narration.
But, again, it may be noted that this tortuous approach
in relation to time is in keeping v/ith the characteristics
of reminiscence; also, this disjointed unraveling of his
thoughts parallels his need to explain to the head of his
family his reasons for repudiating his heritage.

These

reasons lie at the very center of his consciousness, and

in trying to trace their sources he must take into account
the many ways he has become what he- is. Obviously, the
discontinuity and manipulation of time found in this section
alone qualify it as a stream-of-consciousness account.
The fifth and final section, though told within
itself in a fairly straightforward fashion, reenforces the
idea of his effort to reveal to McCaslin the reasons for
his rejection of his patrimony.

Just as one recalls the

most critical decision of his life in all its ramifications,

a frequent accompaniment is an after-thought as to what
set one finally on the road to that decision.

In this

52
manner, Ike recalls, in the final section, his last visit
to the woods before society takes over, remembering his
realization of the irrevocable loss of the wilderness as
a way of life.
Other-techniques belonging in the stream-ofconsciousness category are to be found in the indirect
monologues and the Joycean epiphanies used in the novel.
Certainly many of the passages in the fourth section can
be properly considered as indirect interior monologues.
For instance, the extract quoted above (p. 23), concerning
the Civil War, is seen to be a third-person account of what
he is thinking as he talks with McCaslin.
has all the usual attributes;

The passage

discontinuity, free associa-

tion, time distortion, and privacyeven though McCaslin

is made aware of some of Ike's most intimate thoughts.
This is true, likewise, of the episode concerning the silver
cup filled with gold pieces and wrapped in burlap, the
legacy from Uncle Hubert Beauchamp.

The memory of this

aborted legacy is first triggered by thinking of his present treasured possessions in the boarding-house v/here he
has lived for nearly sixty years (p.288), and it ends with
the memory of McCaslin's bringing to him the first thirty
dollars from the estate (p. 296) . Perhaps the clearest
example of the indirect monologue, combined with other
techniques, is the long scene with his wife (pp. 297-301).

53
The first part of this particular memory sequence concerns
the early days of marriage when "it was the new country,
his heritage too as it was the heritage of all, out of
the earth, beyond the earth yet of the earth" (p. 298),
and the last part of it ends with what he first thinks
is her crying but is her bitter laughter (p. 301).
There is at least one direct interior monologue,
found also in the fourth section.

In the debate with

McCaslin over the Negroes, in speaking of "the old free

fathers" (p. 283), he remembers McCaslin's and his conversation a week after he and the fyce had encountered Old
Ben.

Sam Fathers had told McCaslin about Ike's refusing

to take a shot, and a few days later McCaslin had asked

Ike about it.

The passage is set in italic printing,

indicating direct transcription of thought, and it includes

his direct thoughts at the time of their conversation
(pp. 284-85).

The fact that the third person point of

view is used, as well as the use of inserted phrases as

guides ("he said"), does not destroy the contention that
it is direct monologue because the directness is his memory
of that time quoting, so to speak, his thoughts.

The in-

direct form resumes v/ithout any separation, as follows:

". . . D o you see now?' and he could still hear them,
intact in this twilight as in that one seven years
ago . . . "

(p. 285). The present time in the storeroom

54
intervenes between his direct consciousness of that moment
seven years ago and its memory now.
These monologues, of both kinds, are helpful in
establishing the sincerity of Ike's actions and of his
words to McCaslin.

These interior monologues become the

true meaning of the external action of his various hunts

and an interpretation of the cryptic ledger entries.
Along with the monologues, as part of them and
apart from them, there is a great deal of sensory impression throughout the novel.

Frequently these images are

combined with omniscient description, which, it seems,

the memory accounts of four of the five sections actually
imitate primarily.

A typical passage showing this combi-

nation is quoted belov/. The events occur on the hunting

trip v/hen he is eleven, the first time he actually sees
the bear.

Again ellipses have been inserted within the

passage.
By noon he was far beyond the crossing on the
little bayou, farther into the new and alien country
than he had ever been, travelling now not only by
the compass but by the old, heavy, biscuit-thick
silver v/atch which had been his father's. . . .
He had already relinquished, of his will, because
of his need, in humility and peace and without
regret, yet apparently that had not been enough,
the leaving of the gun v/as not enough. He stood
for a momenta child, alien and lost in the
green and soaring gloom of the markless wilderness.
Then he relinquished completely to it. It was
the watch and the compass. He v/as still tainted. . .
he did what Sam had coached and drilled him as
the next and last, seeing as he sat down on the

55
log the crooked print, the warped indentation
in the wet ground which while he looked at it
continued to fill with water until it was level
. full and the water began to overflow and the
sides of the print began to dissolve away.
Even as he looked up he saw the next one, and,
moving, the one beyond it . . . and the v/ilderness
coalesced. It rushed, soundless, and solidified
the tree, -the bush, the compass and the watch
glinting where a ray of sunlight touched them.
Then he saw the bear. . . . Then it moved. It
crossed the glade without haste, walking for an
instant into the sun's full glare and out of it,
and stopped again and looked back at him across
one shoulder. Then it was gone. It didn't v/alk
into the woods. It faded, sank back into the
wilderness without motion as he had watched a
fish, a huge old bass, sink back into the dark
depths of its pool and vanish without even any
movement of its fins (pp. 201-203).
Here can be seen the impressionist use of imagery, especially
in the last part, as the bear, instead of walking into the
trees, fades and sinks into the wilderness, symbolizing its
complete oneness with the omnipresent myriad life of the
wilderness.

The omniscient description has a peculiarly

original slant in that the voice describing his actions

and his thoughts is that of Ike himself seventy years later.
A number of other sensory impressions, taken at
random, show how v/ell Ike's consciousness is represented.
These are listed without comment since they convey their
own message:
(1) the deer, the buck, smoke-colored, elongated
with speed . . . the gray half-liquid
morning (p. 190);
(2) standing beside Sam in the thick great gloom
of ancient woods and the winter's dying

56
afternoon, he looked quietly down at the
rotted log scored and gutted with clawmarks and, in the v/et earth beside it, the
print of the enormous v/arped two-toed
foot (p. 194);
(3) a flavor like brass in the sudden run of
saliva in his mouth (p. 194);
(4) the gap of iron earth beneath the brilliant
and rigid night . . . tasting, tongue
palate and to the very bottom of his lungs,
the searing dark (p. 219) ;
(5) a walnut a little larger than a football
and with a machinist's hamTier had shaped
features into it and then painted it,
mostly red (p. 220);
(6) the v/oods . . . and the rain-heavy air
were one uproar. It rang and clamored;
it echoed and broke . . . and reformed and
clamored and rang (p. 231);
(7) then the bear surged erect . . . It didn't
collapse, crumple. It fell all of a piece,
as a tree falls (p. 232);
(8) toward the long wailing of the horn and
the shots which seemed to linger intact
somewhere in the thick streaming air (p. 236);
(9) the bear, the yearling . . . sitting up,
its forearms against its chest and its
wrists limply arrested as if it had been
surprised in the act of covering its face
to pray (p. 311);
(10) he could smell it nov/: the thin sick smell
of rotting cucumbers and something else
which had no name (p. 315).
Taken in sum, the examples show a full range of the sense,
allowing the reader to live what Ike perceives.

Such

vivid representation of consciousness gives depth to a

character who might otherv/ise seem overly romantic, verbose,
and even sanctimonious.

57
The most profound depth, however, is revealed in
those scenes relating the near-epiphanies and the epiphany
itself.

Building on what "ran in his knowledge before he

ever saw it" (p. 187), he recognizes the bear as "too

big for the very country which was its constricting scope"
(p. 187) and the "epitome and apotheosis of the old wild
life" (p. 188). Feeling the power of the bear when he
senses that it is looking at him, he thinks later of "the
two of them, shadowy in the limbo from which time emerged
and became time:

the old bear absolved of mortality and

himself who shared a little of it" (p. 197). But all of

his appreciation of what the wilderness means and of his
searching for the essential nature of man is reached in
the moment, after relinquishing all symbols of civilization,
when
the wilderness coalesced. It rushed, soundless,
and solidified. . . . Then he saw the bear. It
did not emerge, appear; it was just there,
immobile, fixed in the green and windless noon's
hot dappling, not as big as he had dreamed but
as big as he had expected, bigger, dimensionless
against the dappled obscurity, looking at him
(p. 202).
Later, another year, he has a chance to shoot the bear
but refuses, without then realizing it, because he has
been able to see Old Ben as a phantom of "an old dead
time" which God had wanted man to live.

Because of this

mystic illumination, his attempt to live according to

58
his naturalistic principles is much more believable, and
the resultant credibility from the reader is the effect
of having experienced with him the flashes of recognition
of eternal truths.
Thus, -having re-experienced the portions of his
life which he chooses to remember, Ike himself has created
a stream which the reader must navigate in order to reach
the sea of meaning.

Faulkner has roiled the flow with

currents, cross-currents, and undertov/s of interior

monologues, time distortions, and compelling insights.
The author has presented Ike as seeing himself as he v/as
then, knowing what he does nov/, intermingling the two to
produce the material of consciousness.

CHAPTER II
ECHOES OF FAULKNER
In the novel Lie Down in Daxkness (1951), by
William Styron, there are several qualities which are
very similar to elements found in some of Faulkner's
works/ especially in The Sound and the Fury:

the use of

the stream-of-consciousness technique; the handling of the

time dimension; unusually well-developed characters;^
subject matterboth The Sound and the Fury and Styron's
work deal with the deterioration of a Southern family;
and' a haunting, tragic tone.

It is the use of the stream

techniques and the accompanying problem of "'the pro2

gression of time'"

that perhaps offers the best evidence

of Faulkner's lasting influence on fiction and of Styron's

debt to Faulkner.

The three main characters in Lie Down

in Darkness reveal themselves in various interior monologues, of which one may be considered a soliloquy; but
the consciousnesses of several minor characters are also
presented.

Evident also is some omniscient description.

David D. Galloway, The Absurd Hero in American

Fiction (Austin, 1966), pp. 53-54.
2
Matthiessen and Plimpton, "William Styron,"
Writers art Work, p. 275 as quoted in Galloway, The
Absurd Hero, p. 53.
59

60
but this is usually inextricable from the indirect monologues.

Sensory impression is used extensively, and a

definite matrix of symbolism is apparent.

These techniques

and devices form the internal stream which combines with

external action in presenting the Loftis family.
There are four members in the Loftis family:
Milton, the father; Helen, the mother; Maudie, a crippled
and retarded daughter; and Peyton, the other daughter,
willful, beautiful, and doomed.

In their attempts to

find a workable and loving relationship among themselves,

they are constantly prohibited by their basic personalities.
Milton and Helen love each other, but their life together
is totally empty.

Weak, alcoholic, and sexually frustrated,

Milton has an affair of long duration with Dolly Bonner,

but a deeper problem is a hidden incestuous longing for
his daughter Peyton,

Helen is frigid, precise, and

excessively proper and has turned all her love toward the
saintly Maudie, with a resulting increase in the amount
of natural antipathy which she already holds toward Peyton,
unwillingly recognizing in her a rivalry for Milton's
love.

After Maudie's death, Milton and Helen enjoy a

false sense of peace and reconciliation, but at Peyton's

wedding, the hatred which Helen has for Peyton results
in a violent scene, and Milton resumes his drinking and
his affair with Dolly.

Peyton herself suffers from her

61
Electra complex and tries to escape in alcoholism and
nymphomania.

She eventually marries Harry, a New York

Jew, but because of her disordered personality, the marriage

is a failure.

Peyton finally commits suicide, and at her

graveside, Helen and Milton find that any sort of life

together is impossible.
The trip from the train station to the cemetery
to bury Peyton forms the structural framework of the
novel.

The cortage is made up of only three cars:

the

hearse, v/hich frequently breaks dov/n; the family limousine,

driven by the mortician, Mr. Casper, and carrying Milton,
his mistress Dolly Bonner, and the faithful Negro servant,
Ella iSv/an; and the last car, delayed in joining the procession, carrying Helen and the Reverend Carey Carr.

These

are the characters whose consciousnesses are used to

present the real storythe various- events which have led
up to this moment.
3
The trip, in August of 1945, itself covers several
hours, v/hich form the present time of the story.

The

reader is kept aware of this present time by brief scenes

within the interiors of the two cars and at the stops
caused by the faulty radiator of the hearse.

As the party

William Styron, Li^e Down in Darkness (New York,

1951), p. 9. Subsequent page references to this work
are taken from the Signet edition.

62
is en route to the cemetery, various scenes of the countryside are presented, including the marshland, Negro sections
of town, the Negroes on their way to Daddy Faith's revival,
garbage dumps, a ramshackle gas station, and the shipyard.
Of the seven chapters, five begin in the present and four
end in the present, with brief scenes in the present time
interspersed, except for the last one, within the chapters.
Such a framewor'k proves most helpful because the transition
between the times of the memory sequences, which constitute
the bulk of the material, is very vaguemuch on the order
of some of the cinematic devices, such as fade-ins, closeups', and flashbacks.
Such an indefinite form of transition is used in
the following situation:

Chapter 3 begins in the present

of the limousine in the funeral cortege, narrated from an

omniscient point of view in the first paragraph, but the
narration centers upon Dolly's thoughts beginning in the
second paragraph and continuing, in a varied manner, for
eight pages (pp. 64-72) . This poirtion ends as she watches
Milton drive away from the country club where they had
spent the evening, the same evening that the news of
Peyton's death is received, which ^//ould be the night
before the trip to the cemetery.
from her, she thinks;
Oh, please, God.

Seeing him drive away

"It v/as just her woman's intuition.

Again.

He's going back to her.

63
Again" (p. 72) . With this faint connection found in the
word "her," the narration immediately sv/itches to an
earlier time at the clubbut not in Dolly' s mindwith
the following sentence.

The passage has been shortened

by the addition of ellipses.

Now here at the country club in August,
1939the time that Dolly remembered, that first
timePeyton had had her sixteenth birthday
which, to ^call back ancient history, was the
day before the war began. There v/as talk about
a Corridorand what was that?but in Port
Warwick . . . Helen went around and around,
dancing with Milton. . . . 'Oh, Milton,' she
said, 'I'll sit this one out. I'm hot.'
He smiled broadly. 'But, honey,' he said,
*we just started.'
She slid away from him.
Don't be a
'
Wet blanket. That's what he'd say.
I'm so very hot. And tired.
Then he danced v/ith Peyton. . . . He is
not deceiving me. He nodded left and right
to the young people v/ho danced around him (p. 73) .
An examination of this passage reveals a number of things
4
about Styron's "technical virtuosity" ; first, there is
a concealed transition in the phrase "the time that Dolly
remembered, that first time."

In the preceding passage

concerned with Dolly, the moaning saxophone (at the club

the night before the funeral trip) reminds her "of a
dance right here, long ago.

Peyton's birthday.

The first

4
Maxwell Geismar, American Moderns: From Rebellion
to Conformity (Nev/ York, 1958), p. 239. Also, Galloway,
The Absurd Hero, p. 54.

64
time, after all the waiting, they had ever made love"
(p. 72) . The details of "the first time" are revealed,
piecemeal, on pages 84 and 92, after the long section
devoted to Helen and an omniscient account of Peyton's
actions.

Further, the entrance to Helen's thoughts is

very gradual; it is not until she silently finishes

Milton's line of conversation that the reader knows whose
viewpoint is being presented.

Another problem raised

by this transition is the means by which Helen is connected

to the present of the funeral cortege.

It is clear that

Dolly is, but at this point in the narration, Helen has

been present only in the memories of those who are in the
limousine.

Since the Helen portion (pp. 73-78) shifts to

Peyton with an e^qual lack of connection to the present

and v/ith no narrator in evidence, and since there are
other such changes exhibiting a similar failure in clarity,
it seems possible that Styron's "virtuosity" has led him
into comiTiitting an error in structural unity.
However, this density of time is frequently very
effective in relaying the multiple layers of consciousness
and the complexities of inner time in comparison to the
temporal activity.

In Chapter 5, Milton, overwrought,

trying to avoid the reality of Peyton's death, feverish

and nauseated, falls into a somnolent daze, and "visions
white as sunlight . . . came to him briefly, vanished

...

65
thinking of Helen . . . Charlottesville . . . Peyton.
. . . He opened his eyes. . . . The hearse had stalled. . .

It

(p. 143). At this point the narration takes up a time

three years previous, the night before he drove to
Charlottesville (in November of 1942) to be at Maudie's
deathbed.

Thinking of the situation of the last few years,

before his drive to Charlottesville, he reviews the cold,

heartless relationship with Helen, his "screened" affair
with Dolly, and his growing alcoholism (pp. 143-46) . He
remembers his helplessness where Peyton is concerned, and
the memory of Christmas of 1941 is brought about (p. 146).
This memory section, lasting for nearly twenty pages,
involves his recognition of Helen's desperate attempt to
reach him, his unhappiness at Peyton's refusal to spend
all of her time at home, and the disastrous Christmas
dinner, revealing Helen's deep-seated hate toward Peyton
(pp. 146-63).

Then, the next NovenuDer (1942), he remembers,

Helen takes Maudie to Charlottesville, and he enjoys the

next week of freedom, but it ends in a masochistic night
of passion with Dolly in Helen's bed, where he is av/akened
with a telephone message of Maudie's imminent death
(pp. 165-178).

He gets rid of Dolly and begins the drive

to Charlottesville, thinking of Peyton and the glad

possibility of seeing her and of Maudie (By-by, Pappadaddy),
drinking from his pint, and arriving inebriated at the

66
hospital (pp. 178-79).

The narrative continues in this

same time period (November, 1942), though the last few

pages are an omniscient account of Peyton and Dickie
Cartwright, the narration having abandoned Milton at the
point when he shouts "Helenl" as a protest of her accusation of Peyton as the cause of Maudie's final illness
(p. 214). Thus, there are six or seven individual times
employed in the narration of events which are remembered
in the temporal space of a few minutes on the way to the
cemetery.

The transition from one time to another is

much more smoothly devised, after the memory is once set

in motion.
The foregoing discussion has by no means fully
explored the time progression employed in this novel, but
perhaps it will have indicated the complexity with v/hich
it is handled.

The contrast of ext-ernal time with the

internally infinite is a fundamental characteristic of the

psychic processes.
Psychic content is presented more fully in the
numerous interior monologues in Lie Dov/n in Darkness,
monologues which are associated not only with the three
main characters but also with some of the secondary
charactersDolly, Carey Carr, and even Mr. Casper.

The

monologues of the less important characters primarily

perform the function of exterior commentary on the

67
principals and the events, but they also serve at the same
time as intimate revelations of the speakers themselves.
An indirect interior monologue of Dolly's, quoted below,
reveals the activity in the presentthe tension generated
by the journey itself, Milton's indifference, and her ov/n
weak and selfish nature.

Again ellipses have been used

to shorten the passage.

All at once the limousine gave a startling
heave . , . she sank back . . . and clutched
Loftis' hand. She felt Loftis draw his hand
away: That's another time he's done it, she
thoughtand it was then, looking up at him
that she had her horrible premonition.
He doesn't love me any more. He's going
to leave me.
The same premonition she had had last night.
. . . She began to weep a little. . . .It's
true, she thought, . . . Through a blurred
film of melancholy she saw a brovrn wart at
the base of Ella Sv/an's neck, unkempt strands
of nigger hair turned gray.
Ugly, Oh, Ugly (p. 65).
Perhaps a better illustration of the self-revealing
V

nature of these monologues, and the insight into the main

characters which they provide, is Dolly's direct interior
monologue, a result of her withdrawal from Milton's
interminable talk of Peyton.

This is the last paragraph

of the longer passage;

His room. We go there how and he pays the
nigger a dollar to keep the hall door locked
and because of this I can awake on Sunday
morning before he spirits me out as he says
and feel the sunlight on my face and think well
Dolly Loftis you've come a long way for a farm
girl and think too as he says in the soft

. 68
morning sunlight that there are miles to go
before we sleep and miles to go before v/e
sleep. . . (p. 71) .
This passage has the mechanical aid of italics, a lack
of punctuation, discontinuity, and privacy, all of which
clearly indicate the direct form of interior monologue.
It is also most revealing of her sensual, selfish, and
secretive qualities.

Being allowed this close to Dolly's

inner thoughts at such an early point seems to indicate

where her own reality resides;
and respond to, passion.

in her ability to receive,

She is simply a recourse to

Milton, and what little action she triggers in the story

is brought about because of her physical relationship to
him.

Though to Helen she serves as an excuse for mis-

treating Milton, it is shov/n later that this point of view

is only Helen's form of rationalization (p. 283). To
Peyton, Dolly is not important at all, for Peyton later
tells Dickie:
It would have been funny if it hadn't been
so av/ful. Apologizing to me for that gruesome
woman he's been running around with all these
years. To mel Why would he dp that? As if
I gave a damn. I wanted to tell him that it
was a fine thing, only v\^hy didn't he get somebody with a little sav . . . savoir-faire?
Why would he apologize to me? I just guess
he's got to apologize to somebody,' (p. 222).
Thus, just as Dolly is allowed only on the outer edge of
the inner circle of society, she is also peripheral to the
interests of the family, which she tries to destroy for
her own selfish reasons.

69
Another interior monologue of a minor character
is Mr. Casper's brief one (pp. 17-20), as he considers
what he expects from grief-stricken relatives and the
unnaturalness of the reactions of Helen Loftis earlier.
His monologue serves as an entry into the scene between
the two major participants, Helen and Milton, which takes
place early in the morning of the present, showing their
lack of communication, and what Mr. Casper considers to be
strange behavior.

He is thus shown as a fussy little man,

concerned with appearance only, but he also serves as a

point of reference for the evaluation of the actions of
Helen and Milton in relation to external conventionality.
Another minor character, second to Dolly in
importance in relation to plot events, and an essential
key to the secrets of Helen's character, is the Reverend
Carey Carr.

By degreesfrom the external account of his

drive to the Loftises' on the morning of the funeral to

the description of his character from some unknown voice
(further evidence of Styron's vulnerability in structural
unity?), and, finally, to the private information of his
soul-search for a revelation of Goda gradual entrance
into his psyche is accomplished.

However, despite personal

revelations of his own actions, reservations, self-judgments,

and the like, most of his monologue is centered upon his
past professional relationship with Helen Loftis (pp. 101-136)

70
In her disturbed emotional state of mind, Halen tries
to seek refuge in religion, but she succeeds only in
reaching a degree of self-understanding in the many talks
she has with Carey Carr.

His memory records in detail

the content of ,their many conversations, at the same time

registering his own secret reactions and opinions of what
she is saying.

Such a double vision is presented in the

following excerpt:
So, she told Carey, she yieldedto her pride,
her hurt, her ov/n abominable selfishness. She
got up and put her arm around Maudie and said to
Milton, quite without emotion: 'Something has
happened, Milton. Didn't I tell you? Peyton
let her fall. I'll have to stay here.' And
she turned and went upstairs v/ithout a word
, more, to Peyton or anyone.
After Helen had finished that part of her
story, Carey remembered, he had been inclined
at first to say: so what? He hadn't wanted to
make all these snap judgments, but his initial
pity for her had been tempered by a strong
irritation: here was a woman who had been the
dupe of life; but had been too selfish, too
unwilling to make the usual compromise, to be
happy. And although he didn't know her well,
he would like to venture that she was also a
complete prig. No wonder life had seemed a
trap. All she had needed to do at certain times
was to have a little charity, and at least
measure the results. And he had told her
so. . . . (pp. 118-19).
The above quotation is typical of a great deal of the
chapter (Chapter 4) devoted to Carey and Helen, though this
selection is disproportionate in the amount of the representation of Carey's reactions.

The major portion of the

material actually becomes a dramatic soliloquy from Helen,

71
combined with a recorded audience-reaction from Carey.
The dramatic presentation, however, is compounded for the
reader in several ways:

e.g., the reader hears what Helen

is saying but recognizes that she wants and needs to

believe her prejudiced version of the past; he reacts in
sympathy to Carey's responses but also realizes Carey's
own ineffectuality; and he is ultimately aware of an
objective judgment imposed by the totality of his knowledge
of others' views of the same events detailed by Helen.

In

the long run, the reader is presented with two subjective

versions, both of which he must reconcile with his knov/ledge of several other accounts, equally unreliable, of
events and of people.

Presenting as it does Helen's

"confessions" and biased reports of her conscious responses,

the passage becomes virtually Helen's, though Carey reveals
himself in his mental recording of their conferences.

This

compounded vision, in its intricate suggestiveness, is as

subtle and challenging as any other narration in this book,
or those in many other books of more renown.
Even though such interior monologues described in
the preceding paragraphs are ample evidence of the use of
the stream-of-consciousness technique, the ultimate validation is to be had from the exclusive monologuesnot just
second-hand onesof the three main characters, Helen,
Milton, and Peyton.

Helen's monologuesmostly of the

72
indirect fonii but occasionally of the directare found in
a number of passages throughout the book.

One of the most

effective passages is Helen's scene v/ith Carey at Peyton's

wedding.

Appealing to him for aid, she becomes embroiled

in an emotional explanation, but as she rants, her cold,

subterranean emotionshatred of men, and the need to
dominate Milton, repressed mother-love, sexual frustration,
the dependence upon propriety, and her conflicting need
to be a part of Miltonall coalesce in her conscious
recognition of the meaning of her recurrent dream:

"And

as she spoke she knew that it was not Dolly's legs, but
Peyton' s which had shown v/ith the rainbow of decay,
sprawled out so indecently in the dreaming, pestilential
dust" (p. 287) . Although she realizes the meaning of her
dream, never can she reconcile the tv/o worlds of inner
demand and external compulsion.
One of the best monologuesnotable for its richness
of detail; its comical overtones, which constitute a
travesty of Milton's desperate intensity; its bitter satire
on the importance of sex; and its depiction of a compulsive
search, v/hose object can offer only a deeper descent into
despairis a part of Milton's attempt to locate Peyton
in Charlottesville (pp. 186-205) . A fev/ selected passages
are given below, with identification appended and a liberal
use of ellipses;

73
In the KA house at noon there was an air
of intense gaiety. Young people . . . the
noise of horns and saxophones . . . calculated
darkness. . . . Solitude, tv/o lovers together
. . . piano . . . phonograph . . . girls'
flushed pink faces . . . (pp. 186-87).
The richness of detail shown above exists in many other
monologues within this section.

E.g.:

And oh God: Pookie was saying it.

'How's Dolly, Milt?'
'She's--' he yearned to be three inches
high'0,K., I guess.'
'What a swell kid,' Pookie went on. . . .
You know what she wrote? She said, "Where'er
you v/alk I'll think of you because there are
miles more for both of us before we go to
sleep.' . . (pp. 192-93).
This, it seems, is comical, though there is bitterness and
also satire on sexual relationships suggested.

The

follov/ing is likewise typical:

while his conscience, reviving from the
brown depths of the day, told him that it was
true: sitting here ev.ading all, hiding his
very identity among people for whom that fact,
at least, was of no importance, he had committed
the unpardonable crime. . . . And it seemed
that if he didn't rise at this very moment,
become sober, strike boldly, act like a m a n
. . . (p. 198).
Obviously, Milton's sense of compulsion here, absurd and
alone as he is, requires a superhuman effort to forego
inevitable dereliction and to continue his frenzied
searching for Peyton.

He thinks of his father's line;

"Ah, for a man to arise in me, that the man I am should

cease to be" (p. 199). Leaving the football game at this

74
point he tries to will himself into sobriety, and
"murmuring I will be strong, I will be strong," he strikes
out for the KA houseonly to fall into a culvert (p. 202) ,
Another monologue of Milton's, this one showing
a deeper level of consciousness, occurs at Peyton's
wedding.

It is at the wedding that he finally faces up

to his Freudian attachment to Peyton and realizes, at

the same time, the source of the hatred between Helen and
Peyton.

Attempting to avoid the reality of the wedding,

he allows his most inner thoughts to emerge, but this

emergence produces the very thing he has tried to evade.
The' passage, below, exhibits a part of this process.

The

ellipses are mine.

/He/ felt unbelievably depressed, and neurotic,
and he had to go to the toilet very badly;
yet he only faintly knew the cause for these
feelings, . . . /He/ gazed up now at /Peyton's/
back, to the place where her legs met her skirt
made of some green stuff that looked like
satin. . . .
Why? Why this unbearable depression?
Peyton's dress was drav/n tightly against her
hips , . . it v/as too obvious or something.
. . . Soon it would be over . . . he'd kiss
her, she'd laugh, he'd shake hands v/ith Harry.
. . . /He/ was suffering boundless, inexplicable
anxiety, and consumed by the same hunger he had
felt so gluttonously this very morning. It was
different. But this hunger was different, because
it was inverse and oppressive and awful. He
felt that the room had suddenly shrunk to the
dimensions of a small hothouse . . .his anxious
hunger groped like antennae, seeking refuge and
escape. . . . /He/ sav/ Peyton, those solid
curved hips trembling ever so faintly; he

75
thought desperately, hopelessly, of something
he could not admit to himself, but did: of
now being abovemost animal and horrid, but
lovingsomeone young and dear that he had
loved ever since he v/as child enough to love
the face of v/oman and the flesh, too. Yes,
dear God, he thought (and he thought dear God,
what am I thinking?) the flesh, too, the wet
hot flesh, straining like a beautiful, bloody
savage. . . . And his hunger went forth again,
sending fingers through the crushed, vegetable
air; only this time, helplessly, his thoughts
became flaccid and wet and infantile . . .
(pp. 257-259).
Most of this passage is the indirect form of interior
monologue, though there are places v/here it comes very
close to the direct form.
But it is in the Peyton section, in the last
chapter of the book, that the purest form of stream of
consciousness is revealed.

Beginning by means of direct

narration with a view of Potter's Field, a brief account

of Harry's recovery of Peyton's body, and his recall of
their meeting and courtship (pp. 310-17), the account then
dissolves into Peyton's consciousness, covering the last
few hours of her life.

The number of events which actually

happen in this section is rather limited.

Stripped bare

of the accompanying thoughts, memories, and minor sights

and sounds, they occur in the following sequence:

As

this section begins, she is in her apartment with her

current "lover," Tony Cecchino, a milk man.

After their

love-making, he leaves and she makes herself coffee.

76
dresses, and cleans the apartment.

Taking the clock, so

important to her disorderd mind, she leaves, encountering

the landlady to whom she promises immediate payment, and
starts out for Cornelia Street to find Harry.

She stops

for an espresso in a familiar cafe, continues on her way,

then stops for a drink at a bar, where she meets a soldier
with whom she converses for some time.

Leaving the bar, shs

has to ask for 'directions, even though the way is obviously

very familiar to her, and pauses in front of a drug store
for a bit; continuing tov/ard Cornelia Street, she is
almost run over by a truck.

When she reaches Lennie's

place v/here Harry has been staying, she finds a note saying
that he and Lennie have gone to Albert Berger's apartment.
She takes a taxicab to Berger's place, where she begs
Lennie to tell her where Harry is.

She walks to the

borrowed apartment, where he is painting; she pleads with

him to come back to her and he at last agrees. Despite
herself, she begins to accuse him of a perpetual lack of
understanding, and he, in turn, throv/s her out, along v/ith
her clock, which she has paid for with a hot check.

She

leaves and catches a subway and rides aimlessly for over

one hundred city blocks. When the train stops, she gets
off and finds a building with a loft.

She climbs many

flights to the top, finds the women's room, v/here she

undresses completely, and then she jumps out of the window

77
to her death.

(All events mentioned are taken from

pages 316-368.)
This long passage has most of the characteristics
to be found in the accepted stream-of-consciousness method.
The entire section is one paragraph, with no hiatus in the
print except for the first ten lines

(in italics) and the

last two lines, consisting of a total of five words.

In

addition to the disregard of normal paragraph divisions,

there is a lack of standard syntax, with many fragments
and frequent run-on sentences.

But much more than mechanics

of style points to the stream-of-consciousness technique;

There is a great employment of free association, symbols,
and sensory impressions.
use of the term,
soliloquy.

Basically, following Humphrey's

the section might be said to be one long

The following excerpt is taken from the portion

detailing her thoughts while on the subway:

Then the cry againflov/ahs I flowahs 1and the
fading hooves along the cobblestones, beneath
the sheltering cedars, vanishing flov/ahs flowahs
into my dreams, in a strange bed, in a strange
land. And I thought then, oh Bunny, v/hat has
happened to me that I hate myself so today;
Albert Berger said that I was blocked up in
my sexual area but I know something else and
so. Bunny, I would tell Albert Berger a misery:
behold, we have not been brought up right and
my memory of flowers and summer and larkspur
is conjoined equally with pain: that all my

6
Robert Humphrey, Stream of Consciousness in the
Modern Novel (Berkeley, 1962), p. 30.

78
dying. That when I lay down in Richmond in
Grandmother's bed I saw her picture on the
wall so benignly smiling, even on that day I
heard the flov/er man clipclop along beneath
the cedars, moved and peered at it in my slumber
through half-closed eyes; a face that once
rushed Longstreet's beard preserved behind the
nacreous glass, still smiling and with a bulge
of snuff: and I reached out my arms,cried
mother mother mother, that image even then
twenty years before turned to.bones and dust.
The train stopped at a station . . . (p. 366).
This passage qualifies as a soliloquy because the manner
of expression implies an audience, and the content is
concerned v/ith her emotions and ideas relating to the plot
and action revealed in the foregoing pages of the novel.
In this excerpt the reader follows her thoughts back to
a time v/hen she v/as a child, with her father \7atching her
as she napped and dreamed, thinking of the old Negro
peddler, a process which makes her think of a strange bed,
which in turn reminds her of her father and of her sexual
relationships and v/hat a friend had remarked about them.
The phrase "when I lay down in Richmond" is a transformation of a recurrent thought, "when I lay dov/n in Darien
with Earl Sanders," related to one of her several affairs.
The reference to "a face that once brushed Longstreet's
beard" is to her grandfather, told about by Bunny much
earlier.

Of course, the cry for "mother" is a reflection

of her need for the mother-love v/hich she has never had.

79
In the passage as a whole, there are numerous
recordings of physical sensations, both present and past,
each usually with its own groups of associations.

The

most frequent sounds she hears, or imagines hearing, are

thunder or guns, and the rustle of birds' feathers.

Her

sight perceptions frequently emphasize darkness, and

wingless and flightless birds.

Thirst, both for alcohol

and v/ater, is the taste most often mentioned.

The sense

of smell, hov/ever, is not pictured exclusively in any one

pattern; it varies from the smell of milk associated with
Tony to a sour smell, most often that of sweat, which she
connects with the Negro servant La Ruth.

Pain in the form

of menstrual cramps is the most consistently mentioned

feeling.

All of these sensations become part of the

larger patterns of symbols.

The first object, which is already a symbol to
Peyton, is the alarm clock, with its endless time, representing her "womb all jeweled and safe" (p, 329) where
"all hope lies beyond memory" (p. 355) ; "the soaring dark
soul-closet, lit only by jewels through the endless
night . . . sheltered from the sun and drom dying, amid
the jewels and wheels" (p. 356). After Harry refuses to
have any more to do v/ith her, including the new clock,
she walks away"with everything gone . . . " hearing
"the last ticking, all /her/ order and all /her/ passion.

80
globed from the atoms in the swooning, slumbrous, eternal
light" (p. 364)and throws the clock into a drain.
Another symbol woven throughout the entire passage
is that of water, in various forms, and the connected
idea of drowning, ranging from "aqueous twilight" (p, 367)
and "gallons of water to drink" (p. 366) to her repeated
remark, "I's drowning,"

There are many such references,

including objects associated with the sea, such as sand,

sea gulls, and shells.

It is her thoughts of the sea that

most often lead her into some specific memory of her father.
As she tells Harry in their last interview, speaking of
herself and Bunny, "Once I had belief.

When we v/alked

along the sand and picked up shells" (p. 360). When

she earlier tells Lennie that she is drov^nling, she remembers
another time, a summer long ago:
Once we went dovm where they were painting a
boat on the beach: I remembered Bunny's hand,
and the v/ay sand came up betv^/een my toes, the
paint chemical and hot on the swarming sumiier
air, swimmers beyond and gulls floating in the
blinding blue; then he squeezed my hand and I
remembered remembering I_ will remember this
forever (p. 352).
At Albert Berger's apartment, she watches a friend, "yet
I watched her through water for a moment, my drowning,
the submarine cave, the dwarf shapes floor-sprav/led, all
immersed in transparent aqueous light.

The voices came

up as from the bottom of the sea" (p. 350); and the clock.

81
"perfect, complete, perpetual" (p. 319), makes her feel
"sheltered from the sky like drowning, only better:

the

sun within submarine, aqueous, touching the polished steel

with glints and flickers of eternal noonday light
(p. 323) .

..."

In this manner the two symbols, water and clock,

are intertwined.

A further examination shows that for her

both symbols are connected with the sex act, and that all
references to t'hese tv/o objects lead to thoughts of her
father Bunny or of Harry, her husband whom she tries to
make into a father-substitute.
The birds, however, are the most frequently used
symbol, both specific kinds of birds and her special
"wingless ones,"

Each reference, like water and her clock,

is directly associated with sex, v/ith the men she has knov/n,
and with her father.

Rememberingwhen she first met

Tonythat their conversation included talk of birds, she

goes on trying to think;

"There were birds in my mind,

landbound birds whirling about, dodos and penguins and

cassowaries, ostriches befouling their lovely black plumes,
and these seemed mixed up with Bunny" (p, 325) . As she
makes coffee, feeling the cramp recede, she thinks of
"big birds with arched hobbling necks and skin beneath
their legs, as big as stilts . . . yet these, along with
all the others, stood flightless in my mind, and noiseless,
leaving me alone;

I feel better" (p. 326). It is the

82
noise of their rustling and their approach across the sand
that she finds so disturbing, and it is the thought of
sexual relations that causes the birds to be animated in
her mind.

When she thinks of Earl Sanders"the birds

came back . . . and the birds came in a scamper across

the darkening sand, /an47 surrounded /her/ once more"
(p. 327) . Likewise, when she thinks of home, she believes
that the birds follov/ her, "the flightless birds that /ihe/
couldn't see . . . " but "peaceful and without menace,
ruffling their silent plumes."

The first time she had

dreamed about birds was after she and Dickie had first
made love (p. 329) ; and because when they awoke Dickie
r

became frustrated, the dream becomes symbolic of her

inability to respond sexually.

This withholding of her-

self in the ultimate sense is connected in her mind with

the clock, symbolizing her womb as safe, where maybe
inside the perfection of the clock she and Harry can have
babies (pp. 329-330).

In thinking of Harry and herself

"dozing across the springs the wheels, the cogs and levers,
all these should give way, run down; then our womb v/ould
fall, we'd hear the fatal quiet, the dreadful flutter and
lurch earthward instead of the fine ascent" (p. 332), the
symbols are interlocked in the word flutter.

On other

occasions, also, the words flutter and whir are used in

description of the clock.

83
In the scene in the bar when the soldier tries
to strike up a mutual acquaintance in Tony, the "poor
wingless ones" come again, as she thinks of Tony, Bunny,
and Harry (p. 333). In remembering her first time with
Earl Sanders, when he had hurt her physically, she recalls,
"It was the first time I saw the birds, alive, apart from
dreams . . . and I knew I v/as paying Harry back for his
defection so small, I drowned on the terrace and when I
slept afterwards I dreamt of drowning too" (p, 334). Thus
it can be seen that not only are the birds connected to
the clock but also to the recurrent drowning image.

As

she says, "Guilt is the very thing with feathers" (p. 335),
and it appears that hers is the best interpretation of
the symbolic birds; she also thinks of the clock as the
place where "all our guilt will disappear among the
ordered levers and wheels, in the aqueous ruby-glinting
sun" (p. 337).
But the source of guilt is even deeper, as revealed by her thoughts as she converses v/ith Albert Berger
about Harry, v/hen she silently cries:
own torture and my own abuse?

"Don't I know my

How many times have I lain

dov/n to sin out of vengeance, to say .so he doesn't love me,

then here is one that will, to sleep then and dream about
the birds, and then to wake , , , and think my life hath
kno\'m not father . . . " (p. 351) ; and with additional

84
information a bit later, it is apparent that "he" is
Bunny.

Later as she talks to Harry, she wants to tell him,

"Oh, my Harry, my lost sv/eet Harry, I have not fornicated

in the darkness because I v/anted to but because I v/as
punishing myself for punishing you:

yet something far

past dreaming or memory, and darker than either, impels

me, and you do not know, for once I woke, half-sleeping,
and pulled away,

No, Bunny, I said.

That fright"

(p, 359). Further on, she adds to this interpretation of

her guilt when she wants to say that she has sinned "only
in order to lie down in darkness and find, somewhere in
the net of dreams, a new father, a new home" (p. 362) , At
the close of this passage, as she jumps through space,
"a guilt past memory or dreaming, much darker, impels" her,
and from a broken prayer to the Lord, she thinks of her
father, and inviting her "poor flightless birds" to "come
then and fly," she says, "I am dying. Bunny, dying" (p, 368)
After a brief return to Helen and Milton at the
cemetery, the few remaining pages detail the revival scene
where Daddy Faith preaches to the Negroes, among them Ella
Sv/an, who alone survives the debacle of the family whom
she has v/atched over for so many years.

One is reminded

of Faulkner's Dilsey, whose observation about the Compson

family could so easily be Ella Swan's feeling about the

85
Loftis family:

"'I've seed de first en de last . . . I

seed de beginnin, en now I sees de endin,'"'^

From the foregoing it may be seen that Lie Down i.n
Darkness is a typical example of the modern stream-ofconsciousness novel.

There are the indirect interior

monologues of Loftis, Helen, Dolly Bonner, and others;

and most clearly, there is the soliloquy of Peyton, with
its combination of the internal stream and external action.
Structurally, the funeral entourage on its way to the
cemetery provides the reader with an adequate framework for
the unities of action, time, and place, although the real
action has really already occurred before the trip.

With

respect to typography, there is the familiar absence,

characteristic of stream-of-consciousness fiction, of conventional paragraphing, syntax, and punctuation, especially
notable in the Peyton section, but also present from time
to time in the indirect interior monologues.

Finally, there

is extensive use of symbols and sensory impressions.

The

novel is clear evidence of the continuance of the influences of Faulkner's incorporation of the stream-ofconsciousness techniques into the context of modern
American fiction.

7
William
Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (New
York, 1946),
p. 313.

CHAPTER III
THE SEARCH OF THE ANTI-HERO
Continuing in the same vein as William Styron
earlier, John Updike, in the late fifties and early sixties,
uses an adaptation of the stream-of-consciousness technique,
especially in Rabbit, Run (1960) and The Centaur (1963).
David D. Galloway calls Updike "one of the most skillful
stylists of our age."

An examination of Rabbit, Run may

show that part of the impression of stylistic excellence

comes from Updike's employment of a number of approaches
generally agreed upon as belonging to the stream-ofconsciousness technique.
Certainly this novel presents the psychological
aspects of characters, by means which Humphrey suggests
as distinctively identifiable with the stream-of-consciousness
2
novel, letting each character's personality unfold in his
3
own language or flow of being, as Faulkner does.
By
using the stream-of-consciousness method extensively, Updike

David D. Galloway, The Absurd Hero in American

Fiction (Austin, University of Texas Press, 1966), p. 48
2
Humphrey, Stream, p. 1.
3
Warren, "Faulkner," p. 130.
86

87
has succeeded both in producing sympathy for characters
who do not have strong virtues to recommend them and in
creating stronger characters than a more conventional
approach, restricted to surface action and external reality,
might have achieved.

Updike's most frequently used devices

are centralized points of view; sensory impression; montage;

omniscient description; interior monologues--with the usual
disregard of formal syntax and punctuation; lack of
inhibition; and a limited use of images capable of developing into symbols.

A structural pattern of a formal scenic

arrangement can be discerned in Rabbit, Run, although it

does not serve as a clearly unifying element.

One additional

feature which qualifies this novel as belonging to the

stream category is its subject matterthe anti-hero disillusioned with society.

Modern man is frequently pictured

as rebelling against a society of commercialism, conventionality, and conformity.

This rebellion is most often

represented in a character who possesses more attributes

of the typical villain than of the traditional hero, and
his actions very often depict a betrayal of conventional
morality.

In order to enlist the understanding, at least,

of the reader, a number of twentieth-century authors

among them, Updikehave chosen the stream-of-consciousness
method as a means of portraying a less-than-sympathetic
character in his stiruggles to find significance in a
meaningless world.

83
The story is, essentially, that of Harry (Rabbit)
Angstrom.

Perhaps the surname itself is designed to evoke

the word angst, which is so v/ell demonstrated in his search

for "something out there that wants /him/ to find it"
(p. 107). A former basketball star, he is disillusioned
with the materialistic, middle-class society to which he
is expected to conform.

In Galloway's definition of the

term. Rabbit is a rebel in refusing to avoid both his

4
desire for unity and the meaninglessness of life.
He
manifests his rebellion by leaving his simple v/ife, engaging
in an affair with a prostitute, and rem.aining outside
the moral laws of the Christian religion, although his
angst and Lutheran upbringing seem to lead him in that
direction.

His search for meaning is unrewarded, but the

novel ends on a note of hope by his reaching for the future

in a continuing search, expressing this determination and
freedom from his conventional life as "he runs.

Ah:

runs.

Runs" (p. 255).^

The story is presented in a basically straightforward fashion, covering about three months. One characteristic common to the stream-of-consciousness technique is
4
Galloway, Absurd Hero, p. 18.
This page reference, as well as all following
page references, is to the Crest edition of Rabbit, Run
by John Updike (New York: Fawcett World Library, 1962)

89
a violation of chronology, but there is to be found only
a limited use of this device in this novel.

What digression

from the sequential progress there is is to be found in

the memory passages, which are always occasioned by something in the-immediate present.
exemplifies this procedure;

The following excerpt

Rabbit and Janice have just

engaged in a verbal bout, v/hich ends with Janice angry

and himself tiredly disgusted.

She goes into the kitchen

to begin supper preparations, and an immediate transition,

within the same paragraph, is made to his thoughts;
She should be really sore, or not sore at all,
since all he had said v/as what he had done a
couple hundred times. Maybe a thousand times.
Say, on the average once every three days since
1956. What's that? Three hundred. That often?
Then why is it alv/ays an effort? She used to
make it easier before they got married. She
could be sudden then. Just a girl. Nerves
like new thread. Skin smelled like fresh cotton.
Her girl friend at work had an apartment in
Brev/er they used. . . . After v/ork, working
both at Kroll's then, she selling candy and
cashews . . . and he lugging easy chairs and
maple end tables around on the floor above
. . .his palms black and Chandler the dandy
mincing in every hour on the hour telling him
to v/ash his hands so he wouldn't foul the
furniture.

Lava soap . . . (p. 15) . /Ellipses m i n e ^

Such abrupt switches to the interior of a character's mind

are typical of the other memory passages.
Other instances where chronology is not straightforward are to be found in sections detailing events concerned with other characters, events which took place

90
simultaneously with those detailed in prior sections.
For example. Rabbit and Ruth, after a short visit to a
night club, return to her apartment, where Rabbit requires
her to perform a sexual act distasteful to her (pp. 153-57).
Following immediately with only a hiatus in the print, the
next section shows Lucy, the Reverend Eccles' wife,
telephoning various places trying to get in touch v\rith her
husband because Janice's mother has called to say that the
baby is about to be born (pp. 157-59) . These events,
although one follows the other, occur in point of time
concurrently with Rabbit's and Ruth's night club visit
and' the apartment scene following.

All events in the novel,

regardless of time of occurrence, are invariably narrated

in the present tense, a factor that gives the effect of
continuous forv/ard progress.
As the foregoing discussion.indicates, there are
frequent sv/itches in point of view.

Ostensibly, the v/hole

story is told from an impartial third-per son observer, but

this impression is soon dispelled with a very early entrance
into the mind of Rabbit.

However, the narration is not

totally restricted to the third-person and to Rabbit's mind,

for, early in the second division of the three sections
comprising the book, there is a transition from Rabbit's
thoughts to Ruth's mind, and the passage becomes an interior
monologue (pp. 122-25),

After a very brief return to

91
Rabbit and Ruth at the beach, the next passage focuses
on Eccles, with scattered portions of it concerned with
his consciousness (pp, 126-44),

Then after a hiatus in

printing, a return to Rabbit's consciousness is made (p, 144)

The remainder of this middle division follov/s this pattern
of frequent switches to various characters, including a
very important portion devoted to a sustained account of
Janice's mind (pp, 207-220).

There are periodic returns

to Rabbit, through whom the sense of progressive action in

the novel is eventually conveyed.

In the final division,

after a brief opening interlude concerned with Eccles

(pp. 221-23), the remainder is presented from the point of
view of Rabbit's consciousness.
Occasiona]dy, these transitions seem a bit unwieldy
being somewhat arbitraryand contribute toward a feeling
of fragmentation.

The mechanical structure, hov/ever,

actually reenforces rather than weakens the action, since

the events and the accompanying emotions reach a culmination, in the second division, of confusion, frantic behavior, and tragic consequences.

Also, these shifts in

point of view among the consciousnesses of Rabbit, Ruth,

Janice, and Eccles, allov/ each character "to unfold in his
own language," much as Faulkner does in some of his books.

See above, p. 4.

92
An outstanding elementand another device of the
stream-of-consciousness techniquesused in this book, is
sensory impression, often in connection with movement from
place to place.

During the first attempt at running away

from dissatisfying circumstances. Rabbit, temporarily lost,

tries to examine the road map:
His eyes blankly founder. Rabbit hears a
clock in "h^is head beat, monstrously slow, the
soft ticks as far apart as the sound waves on
the shore he had wanted to reach. He burns his
attention through the film fogging his eyes
dovm into the map again. At once "Frederick"
pops into sight, but in trying to steady its
position he.loses it, and fury makes the bridge
of his nose ache. The names melt away and he
sees the map whole, a net, all those red lines
and blue lines and stars, a net he is somev/here
caught in. He claws at it and tears it . . .
until he has a wad he can squeeze in his hand
like a ball. He rolls down the windov/ and
throv/s the ball out; it explodes, and the bent
scraps like disembodied v/ings flicker back over
the top of the car . . . (p. 34),
Here, the series of impressions convey his sense of frustration and despair.

It is also during this trip that a

number of scenes become almost a list of sights, as the

following passage shows:
He comes into Brewer from the south, seeing
it as a gradual multiplication of houses among
the trees beside the road and then as a treeless
waste of industry, show factories and bottling
plants and company parking lots and knitting
mills converted to electronic parts and elephantine
gas tanks lifting above trash-filled swampland
yet lower than the blue edge of the mountain
from whose crest Brewer was a warm carpet woven
around a single shade of brick (p. 36).

93
The foregoing is one paragraph and one sentence; however,
the sentence gives an impression of being several, because
of the wealth of details.

The sense of movement is con-

veyed by the repetitive use of a,nd to connect the successive

impressions.

Clearly, it is Rabbit's consciousness which

is used here, a fact that is apparent not only from the

direct statement, "seeing it , . , " but also from the more
subtle clues of "elephantine," "lifting above," and so on.
It is, however, as might be expected, in the scenes
concerned with sex that the most vivid sensory impressions
occur.

But these scenes are deliberately intensified

because almost all of them are perceived through Rabbit's

consciousness and are designed to help the reader understand his overpowering need to communicate, in the deepest
sense, v/ith his fellov/-man.

This need is more than simple

gratification; it is an urgency to become identified with

man.

The following passage, abbreviated, will show both

the abundance of sensory impression and the desire to

"express his compassionto embrace the very soul of man:"
Taste, salt and sour, sv/irls back with his
own saliva. She rolls away . . . the precious
red touch breaking, tv/ists. Cool new skin
. . . and closes his eyes on the food of her
again, . . . He wants time to stretch long,
to great length and thinness. As they deepen
together he feels impatience that through all

7
Galloway, Absurd Hero, p. 31.

94
their twists they remain separate flesh.
. - . She floats through his blood as under
his eyelids a salt smell, damp pressure, the
sense of her smallness , , . and the ache at
the parched root of his tongue each register
their colors (p. 72), /Ellipses mine./
That such an ultimate spiritual union with the world as
that suggested in this passage is denied him does not
prevent him from continuing his search.

And this he does

throughout the novel. Understanding the unexpressed need

in Rabbit creates sympathy for a character who otherv/ise
might be seen as undeseirving of serious study.
Closely associated v/ith the extensive use of sensory
impression in Rabbit, Run is the cinematic device of
montage, with some accompanying omniscient description,
v/hich occurs from time to time in the novel. These passages
are largely restricted to Rabbit's perceptions, although
the use of third-person point of view may at first be misleading.

The most effective use of this device is at times

of spatial movement.

For example, the following excerpt

is at a point, early in the story, when Rabbit is going

home, running for sheer enjoyment.

The ellipses are mine.

. . . Running uphill. Past a block of big

homes, fortresses of cement and brick inset
with doorways of stained and beveled glass and
windows of potted plants, and then halfway up
another block, which holds a development built
all at once in the Thirties, The frame homes
climb the hill like a single staircase. . . .
Two tan windows, wide-spaced like the eyes of
an animal . . . composition shingling varying
in color from bruise to dung. The fronts are

95
clapboards, weathered and white except for those
gaps which individual o\^mers have painted green
and barn-red and v/heat-color . . . (p. 10) .
This passage, typical of many others in the way it is
brought in and in the manner of expression, is a somev/hat
more formal type of montage than that displayed in montage
sections employed by many other writers.

Here, however,

the perceptions are fully formulated, and at the same time

give the impression of swift, successive stages of movement,
Also, there are a number of places which clearly indicate
that these things appear that v/ay to Rabbit,
A few pages later. Rabbit is again on his way to
another place, this time to his mother-in-law's-house, and
the montage method is used to convey his passage, to deepen
the reader's understanding of Rabbit as a sentient and
sensitive person, and to build a more realistic setting.
Selected phrases from this section also convey many sensory impressions, as the following passage shows. Again
the ellipses have been used for the sake of brevity.
Outisde it is growing dark and cool. The
Norwegian maples exhale the smell of their
sticky nev^ buds . . , silver patch of a television set . . . warm bulbs burning in kitchens,
like fires at the backs of caves. He walks
downhill . , , He now and then touches with
his hand the rough bark of a tree or the drytwigs of a hedge, to give himself the small
answer of a texture, , , . A mailbox stands
leaning, . . . Tall two-petaled street sign,
the cleat-gouged trunk of the telephone pole
holding its insulators against the sky, fire
hydrant like a golden bush: a grove. . . . The
insulators giant blue eggs in a windy nest.

96
As he walks along Potter Avenue the wires
at their silent height strike into and through
the crowns of the breathing maples (p. 17).
The passage continues, similarly at some length, until he
finally reaches his parents' duplex, at which point the
narration takes a definite inward turn into his memory.
Updike's consistent use of the cinematic device
is illustrated by a very brief excerpt, with ellipses
added, from a long passage in the middle division of the
book, as follows;
He runs most of the way to the hospital.
Up Summer one block, then down Youngquist, a
street parallel to Weiser on the north, a
street of brick tenements and leftover business
- places, shoe-repair nooks smelling secretively
of leather, darkened candy stores, insurance
agencies with photographs of tornado damage in
the v/indows, real estate offices lettered in
gold, a bookshop. . . . The railroad tracks
. . . slide between walls of blackened stone
soft with soot like moss through the center of
the city, threads of metal deep belov/ in a
dark.aess like a river, taking .narrov/ sunset
tints of pink from the neon lights. . . . Music
rises to him. The heavy boards of the old
bridge, waxed black v/ith locomotive smoke,
rumble under his feet. . . . He runs harder
. . . parking meters begin . . . a new drive-in
bank . . . a limestone church . . . the clicks
of a billiard game . . . an old Negro sweeping
up in green aquarium light. Now the pulpy
seeds of some tree are under his feet. . . .
The St. Joseph's parking lot is a striped
asphalt square. . . . He sees the moon . . .
stops stark on his small scrabbled shadow on
the asphalt to look up toward the heavenly
stone that mirrors with metallic brightness the
stone that has risen inside his hot skin.
Make .it be all right, he prays to it, and goes
in the rear entrance (p. 162).

97
Physical movement, detailed sensory perceptions, and
emotion are all presented here.
In a final passage of montage. Rabbit is not only
physically running but also running away, away from the
tangled emotions and misunderstanding of everyone at the
graveside.

Intense feeling is characteristic of this

portion, and the setting of a patch of woods on the

mountain crest reenforces the primitive atmosphere.

selection, shortened by means of ellipses, which exemplifies these elements follov/s;

Rabbit crouches and runs raggedly. His
hands and face are scratched . . . Deeper inside
there is more space. The pine trees smother all
other growth. Their brov/n needles muffle the
rough earth v>rith a slippery blanket; sunshine
falls in narrow slots on this dead floor. It
is dim but hot in here. . . . Dead lo\>:er branches
thrust at the level of his eyes. . . . He turns
to see if he has left the people behind. . . .
No one is following. Far off . . . glov^/s . . .
perhaps the green of the cemetery. . . . In
turning he loses some sense of direction. But
the tree-trunks are at first in neat rows, that
carry him along between them, and he walks
always against the slope of the land. . , ,
Only by going downhill can he be returned to
the others.
. . . These are older trees. The darkness
under them is denser and the ground is steeper.
Rocks jut up through the blanket of needles,
scabby with lichen; collapsed trunks hold
intricate claws across his path. . . . Pausing
. . . he becomes conscious . . . of a whisper
that fills the brov/n tunnels all around him.
. . . The surrounding trees are too tall for
him to see any sign, even a remote cleared
landscape, of civilization. , , , He becomes
frightened, . . . He struggles against his

98
impulse to keep turning his head . . . but
his fear fills the winding space betv/een the
tree-trunks with agile threats, (pp. 245-46),
In this excerpt can be seen traces of omniscient descriptionHumphrey's term to denote that which expresses the psychic
life of a character.

Certainly, a great deal of inner

feeling affects what he experiences in the tangible world

presented here.
Other scenes in which minute details are noted by
the consciousness of Rabbit may be found at points where
a sense of the passage of time is necessary, as in Mrs.
Smith's parlor (p. 185), or where a series of little details
convey a sense of day-to-day action, as in the section concerning Rabbit and his son's activities while Janice is
still in the hospital (pp. 187-90).

Perhaps one of the

most effective uses of montage in the novel is in the

funeral parlor scene, where the multiplicity of details
emphasizes the ugliness, the obscenity connected v/ith the
death of the innocent (pp. 239-42),

Montage, expressing

action and coexistence of the inner with the outer life,

forms an important element in the stylistic technique of
this book.
A further feature of the stream-of-consciousness
method in Rabbit, Run may be found in the interior monologues used in the book.

There are three characters whose

inner thoughts are presented at some length, and the consciousness of the main character is given in various forms

99
throughout the book.

Some of these portions which may be

designated as interior monologues seem, at first, to be

the indirect form, in which the words of the author are
used and in which directed thinking and rational control
are apparent.- However, upon closer examination, many of
these monologues seem more clearly direct interior monologues, the form of the monologue in which the psychic
content is partly or entirely unuttered.

A look at a

passage focused on the Reverend Jack Eccles may serve to

illustrate the more indirect classification.
Early in the middle section of the book, the reader
is allowed into the mind of Eccles, who until nov/ has been
seen through Rabbit's consciousness.

With an abrupt shift

from Ruth and Rabbit at the beach, the narration centers

upon Eccles v/ith this statement:

"Making awkv/ard calls

is agony for Eccles; at least anticipation of them is.

Usually the dream is worse than the reality:

has disposed the world.

so God

The actual presences of people

are always bearable" (p, 126), Combined with Eccles,

actions in visiting the Springers, then Rabbit's parents,
and finally, the Lutheran pastor, Kruppenbach, is a progressive penetration into his thoughts.

The process ranges

from his impression of Mrs. Springer as "a long-suffering

fat factory wife" (p. 127), to Harry (Rabbit) as "a son
of the morning" (p, 127), and to his congregation, which is

100
like Mrs. Springer's "talk of the smiling gossip encircling
this affair , , . surrounding him with a dreadful reality,
like the reality of those hundred faces . , , on Sunday
mornings at 11:30" (p. 129). When Mrs. Springer at one
point mentions calling the police, he reacts silently as
follows;
He seems to hear that she is going to call the
police to arrest him. Why not? With his white
collar he forgets God's name on every word he
speaks. He steals belief from the children he
is supposed to be teaching. He murders faith
in the minds of any who really listen to his
babble. He commits fraud v/ith every schooled
cadence of the service, mouthing Our Father
when his heart knows the real father he is
trying to please, has been trying to please
- all his life. When he asks her, "What can the
police do?" he seems to himself to mean what
can they do to him, (pp. 129-30).
On leaving the Angstroms, Eccles "gets into his car thirsty
and vexed.

There was something pleasant said in the last

half-hour but he can't remember what it was. . . . He's

scratched . . .he's spent an afternoon in a bramble
patch. . . . Down there between the brambles there seamed
to be no Harry at all . . . "

(p. 140). This and a passage

almost immediately following, in Kruppenbach's den from

where he sees the golf course and thinks of lying to Mrs.
Angstrom about Harry and his golf, provide the most
intimate knov/ledge of Eccles except for sporadic glimpses
in the remaining pages.

101
The several quotations just cited can be seen as
the words of the author in presenting Eccles' thoughts
and feelings.

There is, hov/ever, some penetration into

his flow of being, suggested in his thoughts of the church

and his failure, and in his feeling that he has physically
been scratched by Mrs. Springer's words, though she has
not even touched him.

The reader, despite this intimacy,

remains aware that Eccles' thoughts are being presented

through an unknov/n narrator, and rational control is
apparent.

This method is in keeping with the character

of Eccles and with his relative importance to the story.

He is not the focus of concern and so must remain beyond
the reader's grasp until he is perceived through Rabbit.
That his mind is conveyed at this second-hand level seems
to point up that portion of society, orthodox Christianity,
which Rabbit finds so unsatisfactory.
Another interior monologue is a long passage
concerned with Ruth.

During the beach scene, Ruth angrily

asks Rabbit if he does not think that he will ever "have

to pay the price" for deserting Janice; v/ith these words,
her eyes begin to sting with tears and she turns av^ay
to hide them, "thinking. That's one of the signs" (p. 122).
Then, for more than three pages, her thoughts ramble,
from the tell-tale signs of her pregnancy, to Rabbit; to
men in general whom she has known in her role as a

102
prostitute; to certain forms of the sex act; to her high
school days and her first experiences; and then back to
Rabbit and her desire to tell him, "I can't, you dope,
don't you know you're a father 1" (p. 125). The passage
continues in her mind for a space and then comes back to
the present to the sound of Rabbit's answer to her earlier
question about paying:

"'If you have the guts to be your-

self, other people'11 pay your price'" (p. 125). All of

the material between the question and its answer is in
two paragraphs, the division marking the end of her
thoughts of the past and the beginning of the immediate,
pressing problem of Rabbit and his possible reaction on
finding out that she is pregnant.

Also, there is a dis-

regard of normal syntax and punctuation, typified in the

following brief excerpt:

"But there isn't much taste to

it a little like seawater, just harder work than they

probably think, v/omen are always v/orking harder than they
think" (p. 123). Here, too, can be seen other qualities
to be found in the stream-of-consciousness technique:
discontinuity and private implications, and absence of
inhibition.
Ruth's monologue may be classified as a direct
interior monologue because it is her language and her style
of expression that are used and because there is evidence
of free association with little rational control.

That

103
the passage never reaches the incoherence of many instances
of the stream-of-consciousness mode is in keeping with
Ruth's nature of placidity and resignation.

The monologue

allows for insight into her real character and creates

sympathy in the mind of the reader for a character who
at first seems to possess all of the less desirable
qualities of one in her trade.

As a by-product of this

insight and sympathy. Rabbit is given another dimension,

because he is seen not through his own consciousness, nor
through the reader's sensibility, but through the eyes of
a third person.
In the Janice section of the fragmented middle
division, a number of elements come together to form a
sustained passage, thirteen pages long, in v/hich there
are actions, interior monologue, memory, incoherence, and
hallucination.

The actions cover the second time that

Harry runs away (this time after they have brought the
new baby home from the hospital) leaving Janice with the
care of the two children.

She attempts to tend to them,

but in the process gets drunk and accidentally drowns

the infant.

An excerpt from near the beginning of this

section will show the state of her mind;

Mother's neighbors will laugh their heads
off if she loses him again, she doesn't know
why she should think of Mother's neighbors
except that all the time she was home Mother
kept reminding her of hov/ they sneered and

104
there was alv/ays that with Mother the feeling
she was dull and plain and a disappointment,
and she thought when she got a husband it would
be all over, all that. She would be a woman
v/ith a house on her o\m.
And she thought when
she gave this baby her name it would settle
her mother but instead it brings her mother against
her breast with her blind mouth poor thing and
she feels she's lying on top of a pillar where
everyone in the tovm can see she is alone. She
feels cold. The baby won't stay on the nipple
nothing will hold to her, (p, 208) ,
The run-on sentence structure clearly portrays the frantic
feeling underlying her actions; the content gives a clue
to the reason for her neurotic behavior and reveals the
shallov/ness of her thinking.
She is reminded of Harry v/hen her night govm blows
against her, and the passage then develops into an interior
monologue, which may be considered a direct one because
her language and her manner of expression are used, as seen
in the follov^ring excerpts.

Ellipses again are used to

reduce the length of the passage.

If there would be a scratch at the lock and
he v/ould come in the door he could do whatever
he wanted with her have any part of her if he
wanted what did she care that was marriage, , , .
And then his going off to church and coming
back full of juice. . , . What did he and God
talk about behind the backs of all these v/omen
exchanging winks that v/as the thing she minded
if they'd just think about love v/hen they make
it instead of thinking about whatever they do
think about think about whatever they're going
to do whenever they've got rid of this little
hot clot that's bothering them. , . ,
Just plain rude. Here he called her dumb
when he was too dumb to have any idea of how
she felt any idea of how his going off had

105
changed her and how he must nurse her back not
just wade in through her skin v/ithout having
any idea of what was there. That was what made
her panicky ever since she was little this
thing of nobody knowing hov/ you felt and v/hether
nobody could knov/ or nobody cared she had no
idea. She didn't like her skin, never had it
was too dark made her look like an Italian even
if she never did get pimples like some of the
others /sic/ girls and then in those days both
working at Kroll's she on the salted nuts when
Harry would lie down beside her on Mary Hannacher's
bed the silver wallpaper he liked so much and
close his eyes it seemed to melt her skin and
she thought it was all over she v/as with somebody.
But then they were married. . . (p, 209) .
Farther on, she begins to feel as if there is someone
watching her, and this feeling becomes the conviction of
hallucination as "she determines to ignore him" (p. 217).
The section ends as "her sense of the third person with
them widens enormously, and she knows, knows, v/hile knocks
sound at the door, that the worst thing that has ever
happened to any woman in the world has happened to her"
(p. 220), These quotations show, first, incoherence,
indicated by the fragmentary sentence structure; second,
lack of inhibition, even though she is earlier shocked
v/hen Harry has made her feel "filthy they don't even have
decent names for parts of you" (p, 208); and third, the
neurotic tendencies of her thought and memory, all couched
in the hurried, frantic phrasing of her mind.

It is note-

worthy that all of the longer quotations are from the time
previous to her having a drink.

The alcoholic haze, which

106
later develops, is cleverly built step by step, with her
first small drink, "with no ice cubes because the noise
of the tray might wake the children" (p. 211) ; then the
next one, "stronger than the first, thinking that after
all it's about time she had a little fun" (p. 211); and
the third one because Harry's "absence is a hole that
widens and she pours a little whisky into it but it's not
enough" (p, 212), This process continues until she is so
dazed that she drinks the stale glassful left in the bathroom while preparing to bathe the baby, who is drowned in
the bathtub shortly thereafter (pp,'218-220).
One can see in this extended section reasons for
much of Janice's behavior, as well as reflections of events
in the development of the plot, and motivation for future
action.

The feeling of helpless rage at her bungling, her

shallowness, her pettiness is developed sufficiently to

provide a sympathetic reaction instead to Rabbit's past
actions and those to follo-^.
As is evident from the interior monologues just
discussed. Rabbit is the central figure for the other characters in the book as well as for himself.

The greatest

proportion of the book is devoted to his consciousness;

his memories, reactions, beliefs, and actions.

In addition

to the sensory impressions and the montage scenes, there

are many interior monologues, both direct and indirect.

107
These range from memory passages, such as the one that he
is reminded of as he goes to get his son, of the time when
he was a young boy at home where he dreaded the quarrels
of his parents ("when their faces v/ent angry and flat
and words flew, it was as if a pane of glass were put in
front of him"p. 21), to his hypnotic daze of anger while
playing golf with Eccles, where
in his head he talks to the clubs as if they're
women. The irons, light and thin yet somewho
treacherous in his hands, are Janice. Come on,
you dope, be calm; here we go, easy, , . ,
Anger turns his skin rotten, so the outside
seeps through; his insides go jagged with the
tiny dry forks of bitter scratching brambles,
the brittle silver shaft one more stick, where
words hang like caterpillar nests that can't
be burned av/ay (p. 109) .
A three-wood with its reddish head is Ruth and "he thinks,
0,K. i^ you're ^o smart, " and the rough is the khaki color
of Texas, which reminds him of the whore he met there who,
in his mind, says to him, "Oh, you moron go home" (p. 110),
Both of these passages are developed much more fully, but
these selctions should suggest the variety of type and of
place where interior monologues are employed.
Q

A clearer "quotation of the mind,"

however, is to

be found in a lengthy paragraph v/hich portrays his mind

as he rides a bus to the Springers' house after the news
of the baby's death.

The selection, in v/hich a liberal use

8
See above, p. 4,

108
of ellipses has been made, begins with his memory of riding
such a bus after leaving Janice the night before. Unsuccessful in finding Ruth, he does not go to work the next
morning because:
Something .held him back all day. He tries to
think of what it was because whatever it was
murdered his daughter. Wanting to see Ruth
again was some of it but it was clear after he
went around to her address in the morning that
she wasn't there probably off to Atlantic City
with some madman and still he wandered around
Brev/er, going in and out of department stores
with music piping from the v/alls and eating a
hot dog at the five and ten and hesitating outside a movie house but not going in and keeping
an eye out for Ruth. . . . N o , v^hat kept him
in the city despite the increasing twisting
inside that told him something was wrong back
home, what kept him walking through the cold
, air breathed from the doors of movie houses
and up and dovm between counters of perfumed
lingerie . . . and jev/elry and salted nuts
poor old Jan and up into the park . . . and
then finally back dov/n Weiser to the drugstore
he called from, what kept him walking was the
idea that somev/here he'd find an opening. For
what made him mad at Janice v/asn't . . . that
she was right . . . but the closed feeling of
it, the feeling of being closed in. . . . What
held him back all day v/as the feeling that somewhere there was something better for him than
listening to babies cry and cheating people in
used-car lots and it's this feeling he tries
to kill . . . (p. 225).
This intense passage contrasts in terms of emotion v/ith
one at the end of the book, as he leaves Ruth's apartment.
The latter reflects a comparative calmness, a plateau
which he has reached in his quest.
mine.

Again the ellipses are

109
Funny, ho-// what makes you move is so simple and
the field you must move in is so crowded.
Goodness lies inside, there is nothing outside,
those things he v/as trying to balance have no
weight. He feels his inside as very real
suddenly, a pure blank space in the middle of
a dense net. I don't know, he kept telling
Ruth; he doesn't know, \^/hat to do, where to go,
what will happen, the thought that he doesn't
know seems to make him infinitely small and
impossible to capture. . . , It's like when they
heard you were great and put two men on you
. . . so you passed and the ball belonged to
the others^ and your hands were empty and the
men on you' looked foolish because in effect
there v/as nobody there (pp. 254-55) .
From such selections and from the many others present
in the book. Rabbit is developed as a very complex character,
emerging from the reader's first impression of him as a
contemptible character into a fully sympathetic persona.
His quest, which reaches no end, is yet hopeful, as seen
when he thinks of telephoning Jack, "I'm on the v/ay. I
mean, I think there are several v/ays; don't v/orry.

Thanks

for everything" (p, 248). Perhaps this last statement

is a precis of his character:

his continued hopefulness,

his need to affirm that hope in others, and his real sense
of appreciation.

Certainly his final running will separate

him temporarily from his conventional milieu, but his quest,

by its very nature, must eventually lead him back into
society.
That he feels the need to escape so desperately
is reenforced throughout the book by the repeated use of

110
the symbol of the net.

Other symbols include the obvious

one of the rabbit, and in addition, the church and the

mountain.

It is the symbol of the net, however, that is

emphasized, and its development from its literal meaning

of the basketv/ork of strings hung from a basketball hoop,
signifying his former success, into the dense net of society.
It is a constant comparison in his mind, reflecting both
his basketball background and continued love of the game,
and his feeling that his life is a snare and the world a
v/eb.
The rabbit image undergoes a somewhat restricted
development, although it is seen at the beginning and at
the end.

It is first used as a partial description of

his features, and it obviously refers to his former quickness and speed on the basketball court. Ruth employs it
when she tries to understand their dwindling communication
and also when he evinces a certain timidity, when she thinks
of him as "her gentle rabbit" (p. 156), There are other
scattered references, such as that to the car as a "locked
windowed hutch" (p, 37) -and the "pale, limp pelt" of
Ruth's coat, which "sleeps in his lap" (p, 50), the latter
probably symbolic of his eventual triumph over her as a
victim of his mildness (p, 124), which she finds irresistible,
Perhaps a broader implication might be a parallel betv^een
the animal's procreative habits and his sexual relationships.

Ill
However, the more valid interpretation seems to reflect
his essential gentleness, his ability to escape capture,
and his propensity for runningav/ay from, but also into,
life,
A more compelling symbol is the church, in many
forms.

There is the church across from Ruth's apartment,

which at first is a symbol of the unseen world v/hich he

instinctively feels exists (p. 195), There is also the
church of his childhood, with its harsh creed represented
in Kruppenbach's "insane spiel" to Jack (pp, 143-44),
Most pervasive is the Episcopal church, literally when he
attends services there, and symbolically represented in
Jack and his many encounters with Rabbit; but Rabbit "has
no taste for the dark, tangled, visceral aspect of
Christianity" (p, 197), The church symbol is rounded out
with his last departure from Ruth's apartment, when he looks
to the church window for the light that "once consoled him
by seeming to make a hole where he looked through into
underlying brightness"; but at this time, "because of church
poverty or the late summer nights of just carelessness,
/it is/ unlit, a dark circle in a stone fagade" (p. 254).
It seems that the church represents to society what Rabbit
is seeking in his private world.

That the church fails

both society and Rabbit is understood by Eccles' feeling

that he "commits fraud with every schooled cadence of

112
the service" (p. 129); and by Rabbit's turning away from
the darkened, stone fa9ade to the light of mankind represented by the streetlights which "retreat to the unseen
end of SumTier Street" (p, 254) ,
A more profound symbol is the mountain, at the
base of which the town of Brewer is built.

This mountain

constitutes a thematic structure on which the novel is

built.

Its height requires a number of concessions from

the human beings who have established their temporal domain

on its sides; there are circular routes and zig-zag roads
and many ups and downs in the city.

All of these seem

symbolic of the twistings and turnings and the heights and

depressions experienced by the characters, and, by inference,
by society itself.

Clearly the climax of the story is

reached in a parallel form as Rabbit scrambles desperately

to reach the crest, away from the "unnatural darkness,
clogged with spider-fine tv/igs that finger his face incessantly, "and toward "the broad daylight whose sky leaps
in jagged patches from treetop to treetop above him like
a blue monkey" (p. 246) . As the light v/idens, he finds
the road and "Janice and Eccles and his mother and his sins
seem a thousand miles behind" (p, 247), But he must descend
the mountain once again, descend into the social world,
in order to find Ruth and his immortality, represented in
the baby she is carrying, to "the vertical order of

113
parenthood, a kind of thin tube upright in time in which
our solitude is somewhat diluted" (p. 254). And it is in
the world of men, at the foot of the mountain, that the
story ends with Rabbit running toward his future.
From this examination, painstakingly detailed at
places, there seems ample evidence that this book will
find a lasting place among those v/hich present the antihero disillusioned v/ith society.

The use of the stream-

of-consciousness technique, in its many variations, creates

sympathetic understanding of the anti-hero Rabbit, showing
the readerto paraphrase a familiar quotation"what
makes Rabbit run."

If Updike's concern has been the

presentation of the "individual personality in terras of

9
artistic sensibility" he has clearly succeeded, and the
success can be largely attributed to his extensive employment of numerous stream-of-consciousness techniques.

9
See above. Introduction, p. 8.

CHAPTER IV
ACCEPTANCE OF THE QUOTIDIAN
Evidence of the continued use of the stream-ofconsciousness technique in contemporary fiction may be
found in Saul Bellow's most recent novel, Herzog (1964).
This technique is used most effectively in detailing the

hero's introspection in his search "for knowledge of the

center of meaning,"

A variation of the stream-of-

consciousness technique from strictly internal perceptions

to a combination of internal experience with external
involvements "reaches its most profound statement in
' . 2
Herzog,"

Bellow's use of the stream of consciousness

results in an original application of the techniques most

often found in portraying the flov/ or flux of a character's
mind.

There are the usual constituents of interior mono-

logue, omniscient description, and soliloquy, each in

association v/ith devices of montage, imagery, and free
association; but each also employed in unusual ways.

An

additional technique, used in an unusual v/ay in this book,

is the variation of aesthetic distance, with the concomitant
Humphrey, Stream, p. 119,
2
Betty Jane Taaffe, "The Quest of the Hero," Master's
thesis, Texas Technological College (1966), p. 103.
114

115
manipulation of time, a complex treatment important to the
whole of the novel.
These various approaches are used to portray Moses
Elkanah Herzog's attempt to accept the quotidian and his
quest for meaning when he finally finds himself faced with
the need "to explain, to have it out, to justify, to put
in perspective, to clarify, to make amends" (p, 8),"^

The

quest itself is conducted in privacy of his small estate

in the Berkshires during a period of less than one week,
though the range of time covered by his consciousness is
much greater,

Herzog is a middle-aged professor who is

listed in Who's Who, but whose work in itself cannot supply

him v/ith a raison d'etre.

He has had two wives, of whom

the first, Daisy, divorced him, and the second, Madeleine,

also divorced, is now living with his former friend Gersbach,
He has tv/o children, one from each marriage, of whom he is
very fond but from whom he is also isolated.

In addition,

he has had a number of extra-marital affairs, both during

and after his marriages. Doctors (both medical and
psychiatric), lawyers, brothers, and friends of various
persuasions, whom he calls "Reality Instructors," have all
failed to help him find an answer that he can accept. He
3
Saul Bellow, Herzog (New York, 1965), Fawcett
Crest edition; this and all subsequent page references
are taken from the Fawcett Crest edition.

116
remembers all of these people v/hile he casts back over
his life during the sojourn in the Berkshires.

The main

burden of his memory centers upon a period of about a

year, although, as noted earlier, a number of events occur
at indefinite times in the past, many of them during his
childhood, v/hich was spent in Montreal and Chicago,

The

main events covered, not necessarily in order, are his

break with Daisy and courtship of Madeleine; the development of the Madeleine-Gersbach affair; his own affairs,
including the current one with Ramona; his activities in
New York; his overnight trip to Maine; the courtroom scenes
while waiting for his lawyer; and the Chicago visit. The
courtroom scenes actually are the turning point, because
it is then that he temporarily abandons the passive role
of the man of ideas and becomes, instead, a man of violence,
which leads him to Chicago.

Once there, he visits his

stepmother in the old family home and during the visit

manages to get his father's old pistol and some useless
Russian banknotes.

He then goes to the housev/hich he is

paying forv/here Madeleine and June, his daughter, live,

and where Gersbach is also a household member, although
an unofficial one.

With some notion of confronting them,

he peers through the window, but when he sees Gersbach

bathing his daughter, his violence is defeated.

After a

fruitless attempt to get some sort of help from Gersbach's

117
own wife, he spends the night v/ith a scientist friend, Luke
Asphalter, and arranges to see Junie the next day.

Their

outing, however, ends in an automobile accident, and even

though there is no serious damage, he is arrested, primarily for having Papa Herzog's pistol, Madeleine comes
to the station to retrieve Junie and while there tries to
get him into worse trouble; but the police sergeant is not

deceived,

Herzog's rich brother. Will, finally bails him

out of jail, and shortly thereafter, he leaves for his

country estate.

It is there in the abandoned house that

he reviews his past.

Throughout the memories of past times, described
above, and during the present time (on the estate), he
composes letters, both mental ones and v/ritten ones, none
of which are ever mailed.

He \^^^ites to many people, knov/n

and unknov/n, both the living and the deadprofessors,

philosophers, authors, doctors, friends, loved ones, and
even to God,

These letters had first taken the form of

random notes, jotted down as the thought occurred, whether

on the train, in a cab, or in the classroom.

The habit

had begun in May when he realized, there in New York, that

"his life was, as the phrase goes, ruined" (p, 10) ; and
he continues the practice into this last week at the country
place until, at the end, "he had no messages for anyone.
Nothing.

Not a single word" (p. 416).

118
The letters, as used by Bellow, represent a
sophisticated form of journal and serve a number of functions, among which are that of a link to the external v/orld,
that of a vehicle for expressing his far-ranging ideas, and
that of an outlet for his attempts to experience the
brotherhood of man.

As letters, of course, they must be

directed to someone, thus fulfilling one requirement of

the soliloquy in the stream connotation, namely, that of
an assumed audience . That these letters also convey at
the same time the discontinuity of experience in the consciousness is another indication of their qualification as
solilo-quy.

Finally, they also serve to relate exterior

action to interior perception.

For example, on the v/ay

to Penn Station, the taxicab passes a cigar store where a

year ago Herzog had bought a carton of Virginia Rounds for
his mother-in-law, and he immediately begins a letter to
her, stopping the letter temporarily at the thought of her
having no husband.

Following a number of thoughts about

the divorced couple and their daughter Madeleine, he

resumes his writing:
No husband. No daughter, Herzog wrote. But
he began again. Dear Tennie, I. went to s.ee
Simkin about a certain matter, and he said to
me, 'Your mother-in-lav/' s feelings are hurt' (p. 40) .
Then the letter is dropped and his mind concerns itself
with remembering the lawyer Simkin.

The letter to Tennie

119
is never finished, although three additions are made in
the remaining interval in the cab.

The first excerpt from

the letter is obviously connected to external action, but

his second beginning of the letter results from psychological association, as do the three additional portions, not
here quoted.

As Herzog himself says in a later letter to

Spinoza, "I^ may Interest you to know that i^n the twentieth
' century random association is believed to yield up the
deepest secrets of the psyche" (p. 225). Perhaps the
ultimate yielding to be had from such random, or free,
association is found in a scene, near the end of the book,
where his brother Will has come to see about him:

Herzog

is painting the piano to send to June, a very impractical

project, and though he is trying to give Will "an impression
of completest nomalcy," he realizes his extraordinary
physical state must be noticeable, as well as his
odd behavior; but he thinks, "My balance comes from
instability.

Not organization or courage, as v/ith other

people. . . . Must play the instrument I 've got" (p. 402) .

And though his "piano" may be impractical, he can finally
accept it as he thinks, near the end, "I, am pretty v/ell
satisfied to be, to be just a^ it ^s willed . . . "

(p. 414)

Other examples may help to clarify how this

adaptation of the soliloquy to the letter form is a combination of exterior and interior action.

Dressing to go

120
to Ramonas apartment, he looks at himself in the mirror
and feels "the primitive self-attachment of the human
creature," which feeling makes him think of the theory
attributed, mistakenly, to Professor Haldane and then to
Father Tailhard de Chardin, to whom he composes a letter.
A bit later, still in the course of dressing, he is
reminded of Ramona's remark about his clothes, about her

saying that he was "not a true, puritanical American"

(p. 198), and then he recalls his years in the navy, and
then his high school oratory, and then back to a repetition
of Ramona's remark.

In response to the idea of an ordi-

nary American, he ponders what sort of mother Ramona would

make in the daily routine, such as taking Junie to a Macy's
parade.

The parade idea, in turn, reminds him of a mono-

graph on ethical ideas of the American business community,

written by McSiggins, to whom he then composes a letter
(p. 199). From this long series, one can easily trace
the process of free association, which forms the connecting
impetus from the external world for the composition of the
letters.

The impetus becomes incremental association which

eventually produces the letter.

The majority of the letters possesses a quality
of coherence greater than that of an interior monologue
per se, especially in the longer epistles, such as those to
General Eisenhower (pp. 199-202) and to Harrison Pulver,

121
his former tutor (pp. 202-205).

Nevertheless, their

coherencethat is, of verbalized thought yet unspokenis

frequently distorted by the intrusion, so to speak, of
omniscient description and of interior monologue, both
direct and indirect.

The monologues will be discussed

in some detail farther in the paper, but it may be advantageous at this point to see ho\^/ omniscient description
breaks into the coherence of the letters and yet helps to
retain for the reader the sense of direct participation
in Herzog's mental processes.

Hov/ever, there is a very

definite blurring of lines to be drawn between omniscient

description and indirect interior monologue, and both are
combined at times, in this book, v/ith the soliloquies and
with direct interior monologues.

In the follo\>/ing passage,

there can be seen more clearly the intrusion of omniscient

description.

This passage is found in the rather long

letter to Pulver, near the end, about "the inspired

condition," which belongs to all existence, as he has
just explained.

As he writes "And therefore", the letter

is interrupted by the omniscient description in the manner

indicated above.
- And therefore-Therefore, Herzog's thoughts, like those
machines in the lofts he had heard yesterday
in the taxi, stopped by traffic in the garment
district, plunged, and thundered with endless-infinitelhungry electrical power, stitching
fabric with inexhaustible energy. Having seated

122
himself again in his striped jacket he was
gripping the legs of his desk betv/een his
knees, his teeth set, the straw hat cutting
his forehead. He v/rote. Reason exists 1
Reason . . . he then heard the soft dense
rumbling of falling masonry, the splintering
of wood and glass. And belief based on reason
/the letter resumes/ (p. 205).
The italics indicate the words of the letter; the other
portions describe his thoughts, as well as his appearance,
in third-person terminology, in the normal narrative voice
of an author.

Just exactly which voice is used here will

be a problem later considered in connection with distance.

This interruption, by whatever third person, is a needed
one, however, because the letter to Pulver has gone on
without any break for nearly three pages. Since the
imnaediately preceding letter, the one to General Eisenhov/er,
has ended without a clear indication of Herzog's whereabouts
before he begins writing to Pulver, the omniscient description is a very welcome guideline for the reader.

The

wording itself is less that of Herzog's normal idiom than

that of an observer.
Another, but briefer, quotation may point out this
same comToination of soliloquy and omniscient description.
Again the italicized lines represent the letter;
. . . And this is the root of the struggle for
power. But that's all wrong 1 thought Herzog,
not without humor in his despair. I'm bugging
all these peopleNehru, Churchill, and nov/ Ike,
whom I apparently want to give a Great Books
course. Nevertheless, there was much earnest

123
feeling in this, too. No civil order . . .
/the letter goes on/ (p. 201).
Although this has a number of elements that might point
to the interruption as an interior monologue, such as the
language used to express his thoughts, it seems clear from
the directly third-person statement, "thought Herzog,"
and from the concluding sentence that the passage should
be placed within the range of omniscient description.
That the technique of the letters as soliloquies
also combines v/ith the method of the interior monologue
may be seen a bit farther on in this same letter to
Eisenhower.

The mechanical indications made by the changes

in typography are noteworthy in the follov/ing passage.

The ellipses are mine.
/The letter continue si/ I_t v/as v/ith such
considerations, reading your Committee'^ report
on National Aims, that I seem to have been
stirred fiercely by a desire to communicate,
or by the curious project of attempted communication. , . , offering these ideas , . . like
mocking flowers in the soil of fever and unacted
violence. Suppose, after all, we are simply
a kind of beast, peculiar to this mineral lump
that runs around in orbit to the sun, then why
such loftiness, such great standards? that I^
thought of the variation on Gresham's famous
Law: /and the letter continues for a space.J/'
(p. 201),
This, it appears, is indirect interior monologue, even
though no author (or third-person voice) is in evidence.
The passage seems much too verbalized on the speech level,
even though it is directed to himself and is actually

124
unuttered, and it is much too coherent to display the
discontinuity associated with direct interior monologue.
However, it might be possible to classify the passage as
direct interior monologue on the basis of (1) no apparent
evidence of author, (2) the use of the first-person pronoun,
and (3) the images evoked by the words bent, violence, and
beast, parts of symbolic patterns to be found in the novel
as a whole.

Nevertheless, it seems preferable to categorize

the brief passage as an indirect one because it is, as far

as the content is concerned, couched in the same form of
language as the letter and is thought formulated into words
at the level of deliberate speech.
One last example that the soliloquy combines with
other devices to produce the flow of inner consciousness
follows:

Lying in his hammock, after having written

several lines to God, he is contemplating "life and void."

In the course of the letter which he is mentally composing
to his mother, the following interruptions are noteworthy;
again such breaks are indicated by the typography:
Some of my oldest aims seem to have slid av/ay.
But I have others. Life on this earth can't be
simply a picture. And terrible forces in me,
including the forces of admiration or praise,
powers, including loving powers, very damaging,
making me almost an idiot because I lacked the
capacity to manage them. I. may turn out to be
not such a terrible hopeless fool as everyone,
as you, as I myself suspected. Meantime, to
lay off certain persistent torments. To
surrender the hyperactivity of this hyperactive

125
face. But just to put it out instead to the
radiance of the sun. J_ want to send you, and
others, the most loving wish I have in my
heart. This is the only way I have to reach
out . . , (pp. 297-98),
Judging from the more fragmentary thought represented in
the choppy phrases, the lack of author interference or
guidelines, and from the use of the first-person pronoun
in portions not a part of the letter, the passage appears
to belong to th'e group which combines the lettersoliloquy with direct interior monologue.

As the fore-

going discussion has pointed out. Bellow has used several

such combinations of devices to project his hero's stream
of consciousness.
It must not be thought, however, that it is only
in combination v/ith the letters that these devices are
used.

One long passage, typical of many found throughout

the book, may be used to show how B.ellow uses such devices
as omniscient description, both kinds of monologues,
and external actionin combination, so blended that one
becomes an immediate part of the next.

The selection

concerns his visit to Chicago during the week preceding

his retreat to the country.

Comments have been inserted

at appropriate places within the rather lengthy passage

in order to emphasize the spots where the fusion of devices
occurs.

Herzog, on his way to Asphalter's place, stops

at Walgreen's:

126
v/here he bought a bottle of Cutty Sark for
Luke and playthings for Junea toy periscope
through which she could look over the sofa,
around corners, a beach ball you inflated with
your breath. /This is external action combined
v/ith omniscient description, which turns into
indirect monologue briefly at the d a s h ^ He
even found time to send a v/ire to Ramona.
. . . Trust her, she'd find comfort while he
was away, not be despondent in "desertion" as
he would have beenhis childish disorder, that
infantile terror of death that had bent and
buckled his life into these curious shapes.
/Here may ,be seen the resumption of indirect
monologue which becomes very near to direct
monologue after the dashJ7 Having discovered
that everyone must be indulgent with bungling
child-men . . . he had set himself up v/ith his
emotional goodiestruth, friendship, devotion
to children (the regular American v/orship of
kids), and potato love. So much we knov/ nov/,
/At this point, the passage turns from indirect
interior monologue to direct monologue, which
continues as follov/s^/ But thiseven this
is not the whole story, either, /Notice the
present tense^/ It only begins to approach
the start of true consciousness. The necessary
premise is that a man is somehov/ more than his
"characteristics," all the emotions, strivings,
tastes, and constructions which it pleases him
to call "My Life," . . . This was by no means
a "general idea" with him now. . . . /The direct
monologue clearly reverts to the indirect form
with the last sentence. The passage continues
for a few lines^/ (p, 325).
Since the problem of voice is to be taken up later, it may
be sufficient to point out that these various devices and
their fusion provide a range of the levels of consciousness
and combine with external events having to do with the
minimal plot.

The plot action here is a necessary prepara-

tion for the critical scene which is reached the next day
in the courtroom scenes and in the police station.
these events, he goes to the Berkshires,

After

127
Perhaps the best example of extended direct interior
monologue is to be found in the scene in the police station,
although others exist in the novel, and certain ones are
combined with the indirect form.

The passage begins with

the indirect .form, as the sergeant questions Madeleine, and

as "Moses . . , unable to restrain associations," decides
that everything is "ultimately unknowable."

The quotation

has been shortened by omitting portions of the passage as

indicated by the periods.
See, Moses? We don't knov/ one another. Even
that Gersbach, , , . He was unknowable. And
I myself, the same, , . . They put me dov/n,
ergo they claimed final knov/ledge of Herzog.
They knev/ mel And I hold with Spinoze (I .
hope he won't mind). . . . Excuse me, therefore,
sir and madam, but I reject your definitions
of me. Ah, this Madeleine . . . such a mixed
mind of pure diamond and Woolv/orth glass. And
Gersbach v/ho sucked up to me. For the symbiosis
of it. Symbiosis and trash. . . . Good-by to
all (pp. 364-65).
Although liberal use has been made of ellipses for the sake
of brevity, the excerpt is sufficient to indicate the
discontinuity of the v/hole passage and, to some extent,
its incoherence.

This, obviously, is not the verbalized

level of the letters, and the sentences are much shorter

than those of his usual idiom; though there are still
identifying signs of Herzog's mindthe Latin terms ergo
and symbiosis and knowledge of Spinoza.

Additional evidence

of direct interior monologue is seen in the exclusive use

128
of the first-person pronoun in the quoted passage, which
comes to an end as the sergeant's question penetrates
Herzog's subliminal perception.
In addition to the stream-of-consciousness technique already-shovm, there are still other devices to be
found in the novel, and in abundance.

One of these is

montage, very closely akin to the cataloguing device used

in modern poetry and sometimes producing much the same
effect.

One of the most useful applications of this device

is the projection of a sense of movement, especially as

related to external action, and, at the same time, to
perceive this movement through the consciousness of the
character.

As Herzog rides the train to Vineyard Haven,

madly v/riting letters to any and every one, his mind

registers the scenery from time to time, usually resulting
in an application to his present train of thought and
usually changing its direction.

Writing to Professor Hoyle

concerning the theory of the formation of planets, he

becomes aware of the passing scene:
The v/heels of the cars storrried underneath.
Woods and pastures ran up and receded, the rails
of sidings sheathed in rust, the dipping racing
wires, and on the right the blue of the Sound,
deeper, stronger than before. Then the enameled
shells of the commuters' cars, and the heaped
bodies of junk cars, the shapes of old Nev/
England mills with narrow, austere windows;
villages, convents; tugboats moving in the
swelling fabric-like water; and then plantations
of pine, the needles on the ground of a life-giving

129
russet color. So, thought Herzog, acknov/1 edging
that his imagination of the universe v/as elementary.
. . (p. 63).
This passage helps to establish the plot detail of his
brief trip to escape Ramona, making it a reality in the
external world v/ith which Herzog is seeking to reconcile
his inner world and simultaneously, it makes a recognition
of his acuity of perception of the "real" world,

A number

of other scenes detailing spatial movement also utilize

this same cinematic device:

in the cab on the v/ay to Penn

Station (pp, 38-39) ; v/aiting after the feriry ride on the

way to Libbie's (pp. 116-117); the train ride home to
Philadelphia after seeing his son Marco (p. 132); driving
to Ramona's apartment (p. 218); and his drive to Phoebe
Gersbach's apartment (p. 317), Not only do these individual
scenes convey necessary movement connected to plot action,
but also provide the added dividend to be had when all of
these, and others, are looked at as a whole.

That dividend

is the sense of frantic, aimless searching which ends only

after the surcease of physical movement.
Another way montage has been employed successfully
in Herzog is in the compression of time. This compression
is to be found in the lengthy passage (pp. 149-53) in
which an overview of his and Madeleine's life in Ludeyville,
the Bershires estate, is given.

The house in its run-down

condition is vividly presented in seven sentences, followed

130
by a short paragraph that depicts his difficulties in
repairing the house, summed up in a final, separate sentence,
"A year of work saved the house from collapse" (p. 150) .
The next two pages detail unconnected, brief scenes in
their undisciplined life.

Excerpts from these paragraphs,

separated by series of periods, may help to illustrate

both their life and the means by v/hich it is conveyed:
. , .His 'desk v/as covered with unpaid bills,
unanswered letters. .
Elbows on his papers, Moses stared at halfprinted walls, discolored ceilings, filthy
windows
Egg yolks dried on the plates, coffee turned
green in the cupstoast cereal, maggots
breeding in marrowbones
Dragging the ladder and buckets and rags and
; thinners, scraping with his putty knife, he
patched and painted . . . laying paint on in
big strokes or in an agony of finesse (pp. 151-153).
The catalogue of details paints its ov/n picture.

It must

be remembered, hov/ever, that these are details as remembered

by Herzog four or five years later. Certainly, the compression of time also contributes to the suffocation
achieved through an overwhelming accumulation of minutiae.
A different type of cinematic effect is used in
the park scene where Herzog takes his daughter during his
stay in Chicago.

The device used in the first part is

that of cutting; by which the tedium of unimportant detail

is avoided, time is telescoped, and there yet remains
enough to allow the reader to understand Herzog's essential

131
tenderness and love for children and for Junie in particular, carrying out the father-image v/hich he himself holds.
Perhaps this cutting device can be illustrated by the
following excerpt.

Again those portions which have been

omitted are suggested by the period series.

Against the clumsy, gray, gaping Museum of
Science she looked so fresh, so new. . . . She
loved the periscope. They spied on each other.
. . . They v/alked by the lake, . . . He let
her take o'ff her shoes and wade. . . . He bought
her Cracker Jack, , . . The dandelions had blov/n
their fuses and were all loose silk, , , . The
mechanical mower was riding in circles. . . .
The v/ater was a marvelous, fresh heavy daylight
blue; the sky rested on the mild burning
horizon , . . (p. 338).
This pastoral scene is offset, however, by the
automobile accident later, as they drive onto the freeway;
but the transition has been made by the imaginary visions
of Chicago which Herzog's mind creates, "as though he
painted them v/ith moisture and color taken from his ov/n
mouth, his blood, liver, bowels, genitals" (p. 339).
Negro slums, industries, sewage, the Stockyards, dull
bungalows and scrawny parks, huge shopping centers,
cemeteries, and so onall this with "infinite forms of
activityReality.

Moses had to see reality" (pp. 339-40) ,

Not only must he face Reality in his mind but also in

his physical person, when the park episode eventually ends
v/ith his arrest for carrying a gun.

132
Montage, then, can be seen as an effective device
in conveying plot action in a short space and yet maintaining the inner life of the character, since the reader
perceives just as the character does.

Relying upon sensory

impressions as it does, the resulting images create an

artistic sensibility akin to that of poetry in its method
of compression.
As noted earlier (p. 114) aesthetic distance, with
the accompanying problems of time and voice, constitutes
a large portion of the stream-of-consciousness material in
this novel.

These sections, so to speak, contain multiple

layers, with each level concerned with a self or consciousness at a certain time.

But it becomes more complicated

since each level may, in addition, be connected to several

other layers, and each is alv/ays connected to the present
or outer layer.

This outer layer is the presence of Herzog

in the Berkshires, and constitutes, as it were, a point

of reference for the structural unity of the narrative.
The problem of distance is encountered when the reader,
who normally views Herzog directly with the author, is often
obliged to become Herzog himself as he looks at himself,
or, as Earl Rovit says, Herzog "looking at himself looking
at himself."

Since the problem is such a complex one

Earl Rovit, "Bellov/ in Occupancy," in Saul Bellow

and the Critics, ed. Irving Malin (New York, 1967), p. 179.

133
and since a full appreciation of the book is based, at
least partly, on an understanding of this technique, further
discussion must be undertaken to illustrate this multiple
perspective.
The present time in the v/orld of Bellow' s novel
is the period of several days which he spends on his
twenty-acre estate in the Berkshires.

In this present time,

the reader views Herzog directly, as the opening lines of

the story reveal;

"If I am out of my mind, it's all right

with me, thought Herzog" (p. 7 ) ; the closing lines of the

book reveal the same perspective:
messages for anyone.

Nothing.

"At this time he had no

Not a single word" (p. 416).

It would be a simple matter if all of the intervening

material were told in the past, but this simplicity is
absent.

Instead, there are occasional reminders of Herzog

in the present as he views himself in the past, in the

present tense of the past action.

As he catches a glimpse

of his face in a webbed v/indow at a moment in the present,

the time reverts to early spring (p. 8) when he remembers
how he had been overcome with the need to find a meaning
in life.

He remembers lying on the sofa in the small

apartment in Nev/ York, but the reader does not realize at

this point that he is recalling these things from the
vantage point of the Berkshires in the later present.
Without any transitionthere is a division in the text

134
marked with a heavy black line, v/hich is used at numerous
other places in the bookat least in content, from his
looking in the windov/ (present) to his self-examination
of the past spring, after several pages the following,
passage is related, with ellipses added.
Satisfied with his ov/n severity, positively
enjoying the hardness and factual rigor of his
judgment, he lay on his sofa, his arms rising behind
him, his legs extended without aim.
But how charming we remain, notv/ithstanding.
Papa, poor man, could charm birds from the
trees, crocodiles from mud. Madeleine, too,
had great charm. . . . Valentine her lover,
was -a charming man, too. . . . Herzog himself
had no small amount of charm. But his sexual
powers had been damaged by Madeleine. . . .
The paltriness of these sexual struggles (p. 12).
Note the manipulation of voice here.

First, there is the

use of third-person; remembering, hov/ever, that Herzog

is thinking (in the Berkshires, in the present) this about
himself, it must be assumed that the third-person voice
is Herzog's voice.

Distance, then, has been maneuvered

so that the author's voice is removed, and Herzog is seen

by the reader through Herzog's ov/n eyes.

We have here, layer

one, the Berkshires; and layer two, Herzog in the New York
apartment examining his past (not shown in the above quoted
passage).

But the problem does not end so simply, for

there is, next, the first-person voice of the italicized

statement.

Obviously it is Herzog's voice; but when?

Is he saying this in the Berkshires, or did he say it at

135
the time in the apartment, or is it a part of his past
beyond the apartment?

The question also arises as to v/hy

the statement is in italics, which, up until this point

in the story, have been reserved for the words of the
notations he makes, for what he reads, or for standard
printing conventions; nowhere have.they been used to
indicate speech.
what he writes?

Could it be, then, that the statement is

The material follov/ing the italicized

statement has been included for three reasons:

(1) the

reversion to normal typography, leaving the foregoing

statement all the more pronounced; (2) the connection to
the statement which is shov/n by content (v/hich explains
the disproportionate number of ellipses); and (3) the
connection to the statement, also italicized, which follov/s
the paragraph.

The final, italicized statement is of equal

prominence by virtue of its typography, and the same

questions can be asked in regard to the latter that v/ere
brought up in connection with the first statement. One
more point of evidence must be presented before an attempt
is made to offer a possible solution.

For the next seven

pages following the quoted selection, the material is

concerned with his past married life with Madeleine, their
various moves, and the ultimate break-up of the marriage.
As Herzog remembers the day she demanded the divorce v/hen

136
he had returned to the garden, he, in Nev/ York, watches
himself v/ith detachment:
as if he were looking through the front end of
a telescope at a tiny clear image.
That suffering joker (p. 19) ;
and then the section is closed by mechanical means of the
elongated bar.
The question of voice-time-distance, then, applies
to all three it'alicized statements.

It seems reasonable

that these statements are made--in Herzog's mind, of coursein the Berkshires, in the present, as he regards himself
during his period of introspection.

These statements seem

to direct or evoke his flov/ of remembrances, although each

memory has its ovm sentient consciousness, very much subject
to the powers of association v/hich channels its own course
in the stream.

Hov/ever, the proposed solution is not

meant to be definitive, especially in view of the fact that

the succeeding pages follov/ no discernible pattern in the
use of italics. Very often, direct thought, or direct
interior monologue, is simply incorporated unnoticeably.
But it m.ust be noted that the narrative is not
simply a flashback with attendant sets of memories; there
are too many inconsistencies and overlappings which come
to light when the text is examined closely-

For example,

the opening lines of the book, noted above (p. 133), are
repeated much later, on page 384, after he has v/ritten

=-Nr-VjJ

137
Luke Asphalter predicting Luke's recovery from the shock
of losing his pet monkey; he refrains from mentioning
his o\m sense of v/ell-being because Asphalter "may think
you've simply gone off your nut" (p. 384) and the opening
statement (p. 7) is repeated except for the phrase "thought
Moses Herzog," and the word but added at the beginning.
Another such discrepancy is to be found in a reference to
Professor Mermelstein.

Having spent the night with Ramona,

in Nev/ York, he returns to his apartment, feeling that he

must do something practical and useful, and he castigates
himself for his futility in solving his problems:
While he delayed, others came up with the same
ideas. T\^/o years ago a Berkeley professor
named Mermelstein had scooped him . . . and
deserved a place in the human community. But
he, Herzog, had committe-d a sin of some kind
against his ov/n heart, while in pursuit of a
grand synthesis.
What this country needs is a good five-centsynthesis.
What a catalogue of errors 1 Take his sexual
struggles for instance. . . . (p. 255).
Immediately following the repetition of the sentence, "But
if I am out of my mind, it's all right with me," as noted
above (p. 384), there is an extremely long letter to
Professor Mermelstein, during the course of which he
mentions synthesizing (p. 385) and at the end of the letter
he says, to himself, "Very good, Mermelstein.

Go, and

sin no more" (p. 387). The connection to the selection on

page 255 seems obvious without discussion.

Also, in this

138
same selection, the phrase "sexual struggles" first
appeared on page 12. Therefore, it appears to this
writer that the real action is confined to his psychic
processes during the week's stay in the Berkshires, with
the external action involving only Herzog; his brother
Will, who visits him; Ramona, who comes to Ludeyville;
and the Tuttles, the couple who act as temporary caretakers.
Perhaps the image in the v/ebbed windov/ is prophetic of his
webbed memories which gradually emerge, with the web being
held to the present framework of the pre sent-v/indow in
the Berkshires.
A simpler illustration of the time and distance
problem is to be seen in the following brief quotation.
He is in Ramona's apartment waiting for her to reappear,
and he returns to his mental probing of v/hat is means to
be a man; again, the ellipses are mine.
. . . Youyou yourself are a child of this
mass and a brother to all the rest. Or else
an ingrate, dilettante, idiot. There, Herzog,
thought Herzog, since you ask for the instance,
is the way it runs. . . . Strong natures, said
F. Nietzsche, could forget what they could not
master. . . . (p. 248).
He apparently is speaking to himself in Ramona's apartment,
but he is remembering, v/hile he is in the Berkshires,
having gone there; much later in the book, in the final
chapter which very clearly takes place at the estate, he
vnrites a letter to Nietzsche attacking his theories of

139
destruction (p. 388). So, again, the curve of the narrative
back upon itself keeps the reader confined to the circle
of the country estate.
Perhaps one other illustration will point out the
elaborate texture which time, distance, and voice cast
to form a web of cross reference.

An attempt has been

made to keep the quotations at a minimum, though they are

to be had in full by checking the page number cited for
each point.

Herzog, in his New York apartment, writing

a letter about the definition of human nature, abandons

this theme abruptly and begins a letter to Nachman, whom he
has recently glimpsed in the streets (p. 161) . Then his
mind recreates the past associations v/ith Nachman,
eventually leading back to their childhood, then to thoughts
of Nachman's Laura and death, and then to his own dead
mother (pp. 166-67) . The thought of his dead mother leads
him to recreate much of their family lifethe passage is
indeed lengthyincluding the death of his mother's brother
(p. 173), his sister's playing the piano /"Oh, the musicl
thought Herzog.

He fought the insidious blight of

nostalgia in New York . . . " (p. 175^7; and eventually he

recalls Uncle Yaffe, v/ho "from the past, seemed to find
out his nephew at this very instant of time and to look
at him with the brown eyes of an intelligent, feeling,
satirical animal" (p. 176). When he remembers his mother

140
again, the narration is brought back momentarily with the
follov/ing passage; ellipses have been added.
To haunt the past like thisto love the
dead! Moses warned himself not to yield so
greatly. . . . But somehov/ his heart had come
open at this chapter of his life and he didn't
have the strength to shut it. So it was again
a winter day in St. Anne, in 1923 . . , (p. 177).
The time of the events of memory is clear, but when is
"this chapter of his life?"

But, to continue with the

thematic aspects which should lead to some conclusion

about time and distance, he continues his reminiscences,
if the term can be used for passages of such immediacy:
"engrossed, unmoving in his chair, Herzog listened to the
dead at their dead quarrels" (p. 179) . A bit later,
thinking of Father Herzog, he says, "It was more than I
could bear that anyone should lay violent hands on him.
. . . Whom did I ever love as I loved them?" (p. 183).
Then mention of the Nachman letter is made again (p. 184)
and he concludes that Nachman's v/ife must have died, and
"as he had from that dark corridor, Moses nov^/ contemplated
those two figures" (p. 185). The thematic strands of
mother and death are brought together in the final chapter
when he mentally addresses his mother (p. 397), and then
he says to her, "I_ want to send you, and others, the most
loving v/ish I_ have in my heart . . . "

(p. 398) . Although

there are many other references to mother and to death

141
especially, the foregoing schematic reference seems to
offer an acceptable abridged interpretation.
Possibly, then, the conclusion can be arrived at
from this discussion that there is a most marked "intertwining" among the thematic strands, the plot action (past
and present); the speaking voice, and timeall of which
contribute in their own fashion in establishing the variable
distances to be experienced throughout the book.

corollary conclusion is that all these elements are inextricably webbed with the present time and setting of the
framework narrative of the novel. This latter condition,
of "course, provides the basic structural unity on which
the novel is constructed.
Nevertheless, there is very little value in
recognizing the many techniques and devices employed by
a writer unless, in the process, it- is shown that these all
work together to provide an aesthetic experience.

That

Herzog provides this experience is beyond question.

Certainly, the reader who is able to enter fully into the
flux of experiences, which is the central concern of the
novel, will undergo Herzog's agonizing search for the
answer to the universal question, "What is the purpose of
life?"

Whether Herzog solves or resolves the problem is

debatable, but he at least reaches a plateau of some sort,

at least a temporary satisfaction.

To the vrriter of this

142
paper, the true resolution lies in his not finding a
definitive answer but in finding in himself a \7illingness
to accept a continuation of the search as a condition of
participating in life.

After such an in-depth self-

examination, -the far past becomes bearable when he can

reach out to the dead"out v/here it is incomprehensible"
(p. 398). The immediate past, or perhaps more aptly,
the recent present, is finally put into its proper niche
when he can say, "And you, Gersbach, you're v/elcome to
Madeleine. . . . You will not reach me through her. . . .
I am no longer there" (pp. 387-88); and the present becomes
something to experience in its completeness:

the family

represented in Will; his own father-role to be lived

through his son Marco; the temporal or personal love to
be enjoyed with Ramona; and his own intense feelings and
ideas to be accepted instead of fought.

The future, then

even though it may prove to be the quotidian with v/hich

he has struggled so longis to be met not with resignation
but v/ith v/illing acceptance, whatever may be, for as long
as he remains "in occupancy" (p. 4l'4) .
Numerous other aspects of the book should be taken
into account in a comprehensive analysis, such as the
imagery (which has been suggested only), symbolism, ethical
and moral values, the Jewish-American identity, and many
others, because the novel is indeed rich in such elements

143
of texture.

Hov/ever, the primary aim of this examination

has been to point out those qualities which place this

recent novel v/ithin that important segment of modern
American fiction which continues to use, to modify, to
adapt those techniques peculiar to stream-of-consciousness
writing.

In exploring the psychic content of one central

consciousness. Bellow has used an unusual form of soliloquy

by means of let'ters; omniscient description; and both
direct and indirect interior monologues.

Employing the

devices of free association and montage, and manipulating

time and distance with great complexity, he has succeeded
in combining external action with internal psychic processes.

His originality in using the stream-of-consciousness

technique lies in his expert blending of the various forms.

This fusion in itself does more than any single device to
convey the undifferentiated flow of. consciousness.

Saul

Bellow has made a valuable contribution to that stream

begun some forty years ago in America by William Faulkner,
a stream that sometimes cuts new channels but one that
continues to flow in depth.

CONCLUSION
The foregoing examination has produced abundant
evidence that the stream-of-consciousness technique is a
vital part of modern American fiction.

Introduced in

America by William Faulkner in 1929, the technique was

first regarded by many with misgiving, distrust, and even
ridicule, but i,t was eventually recognized for its unique
values.

The stream-of-consciousness method has remained

an integral part of much of our fiction, although at times

it has become temporarily submerged, and it seems apparent
that it will continue to be used, especially by those
writers attempting to depict man's unending search for
total reality.
The basic approaches for which modern writers have
the greatest adaptation are the interior monologues and
the soliloquy.

In applying these techniques, the element

of time has received the greatest variation of treatment.

Other devices, which have become almost hallmarks of the
stream-of-consciousness technique, are extensive employment
of sensory impression, symbolic structures, various forms
of montage, and free association based on psychological
descriptions of mental activity.

In representing the flow

and discontinuity of psychic activity, most v/riters have

resorted to the use of a number of mechanical aids, most
144

145
notably italics and fragmentary sentence structure, with
a lack of conventional paragraphing, punctuation, and
capitalization.
One advantage of the stream-of-consciousness technique is the involvement of the reader, often demanding
of him a certain amount of creative activity in order to
understand not only the immediate world of the novel but
also the larger implications which its totality projects.
Usually forced to form his own judgments, the casual reader
abandons such novels in frustration, but the careful reader,
especially v/ith some understanding of the stream-ofconsciousness method, finds the experience most rewarding.
The immediacy produced by the use of stream of consciousness
results in an empathy v/ith the character, which is rarely
encountered in the more traditional descriptive novel, and
a sense of a broader concept of humanity is not the least
of the advantages to be had from the experience of a
stream-of-consciousness account.
Ranging in degree of application of the technique
from that of its usage in one or two scenes to an exclusive
employment of it as the single technique of the work, modern
novels have continued to use the stream-of-consciousness
method.

Because of its utility, advantages, and adapt-

ability, it is to be expected that further applications

will be made by future writers.

Certainly it has made a

w
146
valuable contribution to the existing body of modern
American literature.

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Bellow, Saul.

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Comfort, Alex.

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Tlie Rhetoric of Fiction.

The Novel and Our Time.

Chicago, 1961

London, 1948.

Edel, Leon. The Modern Psychological Novel. New York,

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The Psychological Novel. New York, 1955.

Faulkner, William.

As I Lay Dying.

New York, n.d.

The Sound and the Fury. New York, 1946.

Three Famous Short Novels. New York, 1940.

Friedman, Alan.

The Turn of the Novel. Nevv/ York, 1966.

Friedman, Melvin. Stream q.f Consciousness: A Study in

Literary Method. Nev/ Haven, 1955.
Galloway, David D, The Absurd Hero i_n American Fiction.
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Geismar, Maxwell, American Moderns; From Rebellion to
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Humphrey, Robert,
Novel.

Stream of Consciousness in the Modern

Berkeley," 1962.

Kumar, Shiv K, Bergson and the Stream of Consciousness

Novel. Ne\^/ York, 1963.
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A Treatise .on the Novel.

Macauley, Robie, and George Lanning.

Evanston, 1964,

London, 1955.

Technique in Fiction,

O'Connor, William Van. "William Faulkner," University of

Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers, No. 3.
Minneapolis, 1965.
147

148
Prescott, Orville.

Ijn My Opinion.

Indianapolis, 1952.

Rovit, Earl. "Bellow in Occupancy," Malin, Irving, ed.

Saul Bellov/ and the Critics. New York, 1967.
Styron, William.

Lie Down in Darkness.

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Taaffe, Betty Jane. "The Quest of the Hero," Master's

thesis, Texas Technological College, 1966,
Updike, John, Rabbit, Run.

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Volpe, Edmund L. A Reader's Guide to William Faulkner.

New York, 1964.
Warren, Robert Penn. "William Faulkner," O'Connor,
William Van, ed. Forms of Modern Fiction.
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The Modern Novel,

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