BEWUSSTSEINSDARSTELLUNG
STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Summary/Abstract: Stream of consciousness can be expressed in a narrative in two ways: 1. explicitly; by expressing the thoughts of the character through the voice of a narrator, 2. implicitly, by indicating symbols of different kinds. The first category can be further divided into marked and covert forms. Marked monologues can be represented by graphic means (quotation marks, italic, spacing and similar), introductory verbs (he thought…; she felt…) or indicated explicitly by narrative comments which are related to the origin of the relevant segments of the narrative discourse. The covert forms of monologue representation can be identified when the text narrated by the character is different from the rest and cannot be equalled to it, but it can be expressed formally as narrative discourse as in the so-called substitutionary narration. The patterns of the representation of thoughts have so far been categorized and integrated into six basic types of explicit internal monologues motivated by familiar typologies (Dorrit Cohn, Alan Palmer, Brian McHale), the model of text inferencing (Lubomír Doležel, Wolf Schmid), and Michail Bachtin’s “hybrid construction”, as well as Valentin Vološinov’s “Inference of the narrative.” Apart from stream of consciousness, the specific characteristics related to determining the function of text inferencing are called ambiguity and bitextuality. Implicit internal monologues will be illustrated with the examples taken from “Anna Karenina” (L. Tolstoy) and “Student“(Chekhov). The paper is concluded with a short summary of the history of stream of consciousness in the European novels since the 18th century.

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