Defoe's autobiographers, and Richardson ‘s letter-writers at the beginning of the novel’s
development as a literary form, were obsessively introspective. The classic nineteenth-century
novel, from Jane Austen to George Eliot, combined the presentation of its characters as social
beings with a subtle and sensitive analysis of their moral and emotional lives. Towards the turn of
the century, however ( you can see it happen in Henry James), reality was increasingly located in
the private subjective consciousness of individual selves , unable to communicate the fullness of
their experience to the others. It has been said that the stream-of- consciousness novel is the
literary expression of solipsism, the philosophical doctrine that nothing is certainly real except
one’s own existence; but we could equally well argue that it offers us some relief from that
daunting hypothesis by offering us imaginative access to the inner lives of other human beings,
even if they are fictions.
Undoubtedly this kind of novel tends to generate sympathy for the characters whose inner selves
are exposed to view, however vain , selfish or ignoble their thoughts may occasionally be ; or, to
put it another way, continuous immersion in the mind of a wholly unsympathetic character would
be unbearable for both writer and reader.
( DAVID LODGE The Art of Fiction)
