S060447

The Stream of Consciousness Technique

 in The Snow of Kilimanjaro

By Xue Zuhui

Abstract

The Snow of Kilimanjarois regarded as one of Hemingway's most charming short stories. The whole story is almost made up of stream of consciousness narratives to reveal the character's psychology, so it best shows stream of consciousness technique in narratives. In this thesis ,I point out that the stream of consciousness technique is an instrument finely tuned to the portrayal of his characters and their internal world. With the technique, the plot of the narratives moves smoothly forward, the theme is better presented and the work possesses more artistic charm when life is depicted more vividly and authentically.

Afterward,I deem that The Snow of Kilimanjaro is not only a typical example concerning the ordered structure but also a typical example to represent symbols and intuitional art by the stream of consciousness narratives through flexible languague style.

We can draw a conclusion that stream of consciousness technique is used successfully in the text,but we also have discovered that it containes some weakness:the narratives are all unclear , vagues,and obscure that make the reader hard to understand.

Key Words:The Snow of Kilimanjaro  Stream of Consciousness

Ⅰ. Presentation of Stream of Consciousness

Stream of consciousness is one of the most frequently used narrative technique which have been adopted by many writers and now it is an almost indispensable term in modern literary creation and critisism.As we know,the concept of stream of consciousness was first advocated by American psychologist and philosopher Wiliian James in his book Principles of Psychology(1890). Later, Henri Bergson and Sigmund Freud developed the concept theoretically. As the theories of psychology and philosophy are combined, they solve the central problems of stream of consciousness writing, including "what to write" and "how to write".

In the field of literary criticism,M.H. Abrams gives a definition of stream of consciousness : "describe[s] the unbroken flow of perceptions, thoughts, and feelings in the waking mind". According to his definition in A Glossary of Literary Terms, stream of consciousness is the name for a special mode of narration that undertakes to reproduce, without a narrator's intervention, the full spectrum and the continuous flow of a character's mental process, in which sense perceptions mingle with conscious and half-conscious thoughts, memories, expectations,feelings, and random associations (p.202). Professor Zhao Yiheng asserts that stream of consciousness is a kind of interior monologue,that is to say ,it is a character's mental free assosiation with no given intention and no logical control by using sentence with self-reference and no leading tag(赵毅衡，p.166).The theoretic foundation of this thesis bases on the proposition of the latter.

Hemingway never wrote a stream of consciousness novel and he is not called a stream of consciousness writer, but in most of his representative works, such as The Sun also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Old Man and the Sea and The Snows of Kilimanjaro, stream of consciousness technique is obviously detected.In this thesis ,we pick up The Snows of Kilimanjaro as an analyzing text and reaserch pivot to discuss the function and the characteristics of stream of consciousness .

Ⅱ. The Function of Sream of Consciousness in The Snow of Kilimanjaro

The plot of the story is rather simple: Harry, the protagonist,was a talented writer who had joined the First World War and later stayed in Paris.Desiring to "return strength of will to work"[1].he and his girlfriend Helen went hunting in Africa. Unfortunately, because he did not use iodine when a thorn scratched his knees they moved forward trying to photograph a herd of waterbuck, he was infected and now dying of the gangrene. It was even worse that their truck broke down on the way and what they could do was only to wait and see whether a plane would come to save them.

The whole story is made up of the dialogues between Harry and Helen, and some scenic descriptions are worked in to inform the reader of the background. However, a series of Harry's ruminations occupy the main section of the text. As Harry's psychological activities progress, the text also moves forward. In another sense, the text is a description of the psychological process of Harry's recollection of the past and his introspection of the reality, in which the protagonist got apperception from death and later sought spiritual immorality. It would be difficult for the narrator to finish the story if he does not adopt the stream of consciousness technique.

The story happened in a very short time:the afternoon and evening before Harry died. However, the story is not limited by such a short period and a narrow space. By using the stream of consciousness technique, which is characterized by its jumbled spatio-temporal structure, the narrator expresses Harry's inner world and displays his past, present and future, expanding the protagonist's mental world in a boundless way. Harry's distant memories were conjured up; his stream of consciousness almost brought forth his whole life. Sometimes he showed his ideas on himself; he resented his unavoidable ending, feeling "a great tiredness and anger"; Sometimes he recalled his experiences in the army and in the country and reflected on the ravages that the war had brought to people, especially the evil of killing between father and son. The narrator uses stream of consciousness and realistic descriptions alternately to achieve an effect that for many times Harry seemed to be awaken from his illusion and faced the cruel reality. Harry strongly felt the contrast between his active mental activity and his weak body. Partially in consciousness and partially in coma, he began to feel regret for his past:

"He had destroyed his talent by not using it, by betrayals of himself and what he believed in, by drinking so much that he blunted the edge of his perceptions, by laziness, by sloth, and by snobbery, by pride and by prejudice, by hook and by crook".

The stream of consciousness passages represent the teeming images of the past by which Harry was haunted. He desired to write down those he had seen in his life and hoped to get started in the future, but

"because each day of not writing, of comfort, of being that which he despised, dulled his ability and softened his will to work so that, finally, he did no work at all."

He only pursued pleasure and led a decadent life in the past, but now he felt so regretful for his past and he came to Africa with vague hope,

"chat in some way he could work the fat off his soul the way a fighter went into the mountains to work and train in order to burn it out of his body".

The narrator uses Harry's stream of consciousness to explain that Harry had so many experiences that were worth writing and it would be what a pity if they disappeared together with his death. Harry was so distressed for it一as a perceptive and talented writer, he was the most suitable person to write down his own stories. However, he now lied on the top of the mountain, taken care of by Helen and a few native servants. He could not move and lied on the cot, what he could do was merely to use his head instead of his pen.

However, the story does not end with the protagonist's compunctions. Harry's consciousness flows as his emotion changes and the narrator continues the story by describing the character's complex mental activities, and reveals that when Harry was at psychic crisis, he was so averse to death and he disdained his past so much. By such reflections, the narrator shows that Harry would not let his soul disappear along with the destruction of the body. How could he reconcile himself to such a fate? Just like the lonely leopard wishing to climb to the top of Kilimanjaro, he was also seeking spiritual immortality. Harry's rigorous and painful self-examination culminates in the famous dream vision at the end of the story: his body died, yet his consciousness flew on and in illusion, he arrived at the square top of Kilimanjaro, a place which was "as wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun". It actually symbolizes Harry's spiritual revival from degeneration. In short, by Harry's flowing stream of consciousness the story truly reveals his mental activities before his death. He finished his introspection on his whole life and at the end, his soul became imperishable. In this short story, Harry's stream of consciousness enables the reader to go deep into his life, his thoughts and his personality. It serves as a line to link the whole story together and constitutes its main content.