The comparison between the two characters is encouraged by the fact that the two extracts
chosen are about moments of reflection: Molly’s monologue and Pamela’s letter.
Pamela’s letter lets us understand her innermost feeling: it reveals a unique psychological insight
into Pamela’s heart and can be considered a sort of anticipation of the stream of consciousness
technique of modernist fiction: Richardson had created a psychological characterisation.
Pamela is capable of development: she is a round character.
In Ulysses by James Joyce the character disappears and stream of consciousness remains.
Under the influence of the new psychological theories (Freud), human consciousness is seen as a
flux in which past, present and future coexist. James Joyce wants to portray this overlapping of
feelings, sensations and memories and makes a great use of the narrative technique of interior
monologue. A perfect example is to be found in the extract of the last chapter of Ulysses which
records the thoughts of Molly Bloom, the protagonist’s wife while she is lying in bed, half-asleep
waiting for her husband’s return home.
1 Goodbye to my sleep for this night / Anyhow,/ I hope he’s not going to get in with those
2 medicals leading him astray to imagine he’s young again, / coming in at 4 in the morning.
3 /It must be if not more. / Still he had the manners not to wake me. / What do they find to
4 gabber about all night squandering money and getting drunker and drunker. / Couldn’t
5 they drink water? / Then he starts giving us his orders for eggs and tea, / Findon haddy
6 and hot buttered toast, / I suppose. / We’ll have him sitting up like the king of the country
7 pumping the wrong end of the spoon up and down in his eggs, / wherever he learned that
8 from. / And I love to hear him falling up the stairs of a morning with the cups rattling on
9 the tray and then play with the cat. / she rubs up against you for her own sake. / I wonder
10 has she fleas. / She’s as had as a woman, / always licking and licking. / But I hate their
11 claws. / I wonder, / do they see anything that we can’t staring like that when she sits at
12 the top of the stairs so long and listening, / as I wait always. / What a robber too! / That
13 lovely fresh plaice I bought. / I think I’ll get a bit of fish tomorrow or today. / Is it Friday?
14 Yes. / I will.
There is a total lack of punctuation and as regards syntax some sentences are incomplete. The
interpretation of the passage depends on the existence of a shared knowledge of the world
between the character-narrator and the reader. When this link breaks down, fiction based on
stream of consciousness technique becomes unreadable. Instead of an ordinary passage it seems
a graphic representation of a metal process and could be re-written in the shape of a graph or
diagram.
1. She can’t go to sleep
2. She hopes he is not going to get drunk at cames home at 4
3. She thinks of one particular morning when he came back late but was kind enough not to wake
her up
4. Wonders what pleasure men find in getting drunk
5. She wished they drunk water instead
6. She thinks some of his behaviour when he is drunk
7. She sees him with the wrong end of the spoon in his egg
8. She thinks how she likes it when in the morning he brings her tray of tea
9. He plays with cat
10. She thinks of cat’s habit of rubbing against people and compares the cat to woman
11. She express her disgust for cats claws and wonders if cats have special sensitive vision
12. She thinks her cat when she sits on the stairs staring and listening
13. She thinks of herself waiting/The cat is a robber too
14. She thinks about buying fish tomorrow because it is Friday.
The statements can be gathered in six main topics to see how mind works through association of
ideas.
