Stream of Consciousness in Buddhadeva Boses Rat Bhore Brishti Influences of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce
Stream of Consciousness is a narrative mode which brings forward numerous thoughts and feelings of a character without maintaining a coherent structure. The term, ‘Stream of consciousness’ is first found in the book, The Principles of Psychology (1890), penned by philosopher and psychologist William James. However, May Sinclair, in a literary article, published in The Egoist on April 1918, first applied the term stream of consciousness while discussing the novels of Dorothy Richardson. Since then many authors have used this literary device to discover the inner thoughts of the human mind. Amid them, Dorothy Richardson, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf have used it more prominently than others. In Bengali literature, Buddhadeva Bose, according to many critics, for the first time, adeptly manipulated stream of consciousness technique in Rat Bhore Brishti. The way Bose applied it to his novel is very similar to the way James Joyce and Virginia Woolf did so in their novels. The article examines how Buddhadeva Bose, directly being influenced by Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, wrote his stream of consciousness novel, Rat Bhore Brishti. It will encapsulate that though Bose followed Woolf and Joyce in using the technique in the novel, he brought some remarkable changes in applying so.
