UNDERSTANDING THE STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS TEXT: A LINGUISTIC PERSPECTIVE

George Orwell’s dictum that a novelist’s prose should be a clear pane of glass through which the story can be clearly viewed, does not apply to the language of literary geniuses like Stream of Consciousness writers. These writers brought a kind of revolution in English prose by adding to it a potential and concrete force. For many critics, Stream of Consciousness is the most important innovation in fiction of the twentieth century. These writers perfected the technique of stream of consciousness; emerged as the most inventive of the experimental novelists. Their work represents a great labyrinth, where reader is taken through a startling journey to an equally amazing realization and understanding of the workings of consciousness After analysing their works, we find that one of the peculiarities of their writing is that in many ways it is unsurpassable. Their toying with language is many times startling and engages one’s mind for a long time. The present paper is an attempt to exemplify the poetic licences or the liberty which the stream of consciousness writers enjoy in the depiction of the working of human consciousness.