Stream of Consciousness

Have you ever caught yourself thinking about something and then wonder how you started thinking about it in the first place? Then you start tracking back through your thoughts to realize how one thing led to another even though they aren't actually related? If so, then what you've done is followed the stream of your consciousness (your thoughts or awareness of things in the world).

This is an important part of our psychology. It is also a process that has inspired writers and the way they write their novels. We are just starting Alexie's novel Flight, which uses stream of consciousness to follow the main character's thoughts from one observation to another:

"I can hear my new foster family bumping around in the other rooms. I don't care about them. There are more important things to think about, so I look in the mirror and count the zits on my face.
One, two, three, four, all the way up to forty-seven."

What the character thinks is interrupted by what he sees, which is then followed by a long section on just how many zits the character has.

The best way to recognize this is to see the "links" in the chain of the characters thoughts. Thinking about zits, leads him to think about why he has them, to thinking about who he inherits acne from, to thinking about how his father left him when he was born.

So why tell you all of this? Perhaps I was just thinking about it. Perhaps you could use the technique to describe both the style of the novel and the character who is doing the thinking (character development). Which reminds me: YOU SHOULD WRITE ABOUT THIS FOR EXTRA CREDIT. How does Alexie use stream of consciousness to present a theme or a complex idea? Find an example and analyze the stream of thought.