How James Joyce Used His Talent for Interior Monologue to Offer Insight Into His Characters

In the latest of their “Literature” series, the School of Life offers insight into the life and times of author James Joyce, explaining how his incredible talent for translating a character’s interior monologue helped to create the now-popular stream of consciousness narrative device.

James Joyce is one of the most revered writers in the English language and a central figure in the history of the novel. He is still hugely important to us because of his devotion to some crucial themes: the idea of the grandeur of ordinary life, his determination to portray what actually goes on through our heads moment by moment, what we now know partly thanks to him as the stream of consciousness, and his determination to capture on the page
what language really sounds like in our own minds.