Stream of Consciousness

Much of The Dead of the the first part—is told in a stream-of-consciousness style. The term was coined by William James in Principles of Psychology (1890) to describe the flow of thoughts experienced by the waking mind It is now used to describe a narrative method by which novelists can convey the unspoken thoughts and feelings of their characters without using the conventions of explicatory dialogue and narrative voice. The most famous novelists that utilize this technique are James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. In fact, Woolf s technique is very similar to Green's in that her novels attempt to convey the thoughts and perspectives of multiple characters through the lens of a single narrative voice.

Green uses this technique to allow Vanessa's narrative to skip from current events to recollected conversations with her grandfather and back again at random. This frees the story from traditional literary...