SOURCE: Pekar, Harvey. Review of Dream Story, by Arthur Schnitzler, translated by Otto P. Schinnerer. Review of Contemporary Fiction 10, no. 3 (fall 1990): 207-09.

In the following review of Dream Story, Pekar contends that the work is an outstanding achievement by a major modernist writer.

In 1887 Eduard Dujardin wrote the first stream-of-consciousness novel, Les Lauriers sont coupé, and George Moore employed stream-of-consciousness passages in A Mere Accident. Schnitzler followed in 1901 with a stream-of-consciousness novella, Lt. Gustl; [Leutnant Gustl] he was among the first writers to employ the technique but was motivated by somewhat different concerns than Dujardin and Moore. The impressionism of French symbolist poetry was a major influence on Dujardin and Moore, who tried to create similar effects in prose. Schnitzler, an M.D., was less interested in writing prose poetry, but was fascinated with the budding discipline of psychology; he wanted to understand and recreate human thought processes...