Notes from Underground

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Notes from Underground: Stream of Consciousness 1 key example

Definition of Stream of Consciousness

Stream of consciousness is a style or technique of writing that tries to capture the natural flow of a character's extended thought process, often by incorporating sensory impressions, incomplete ideas, unusual syntax... read full definition
Stream of consciousness is a style or technique of writing that tries to capture the natural flow of a character's extended thought process, often by incorporating... read full definition
Stream of consciousness is a style or technique of writing that tries to capture the natural flow of a character's... read full definition
Part 1, Chapter 3
Explanation and Analysis—An Ongoing Crisis:

Although Dostoevsky was writing a little before stream of consciousness became a topic of literary criticism and discussion, he employs the technique from time to time in Notes From Underground. For instance, in Part 1, Chapter 3, The Underground Man uses a stream-of-consciousness writing style to show the conflict that his desires have with one another:

But it’s precisely in that cold, abominable state of half-despair and half-belief, in that conscious burial of itself alive in the underground for forty years because of its pain, in that powerfully created, yet partly dubious hopelessness of its own predicament, in all that venom of unfulfilled desire turned inward, in all that fever of vacillation, of resolutions adopted once and for all and followed a moment later by repentance—herein precisely lies the essence of that strange enjoyment I was talking about earlier.