Look no further than the first paragraph of Faulkner's
"Barn Burning" to find his free-style stream-of-consciousness
narration:
The store in which the justice of the Peace's
court was sitting smelled of cheese. The boy, crouched on his nail keg at the back of
the crowded room, knew he smelled cheese, and more: from where he sat he could see the
ranked shelves close-packed with the solid, squat, dynamic shapes of tin cans whose
labels his stomach read, not from the lettering which meant nothing to his mind but from
the scarlet devils and the silver curve of fish - this, the cheese which he knew he
smelled and the hermetic meat which his intestines believed he smelled coming in
intermittent gusts momentary and brief between the other constant one, the smell and
sense just a little of fear because mostly of despair and grief, the old fierce pull of
blood. He could not see the table where the Justice sat and before which his father and
his father's enemy (our enemy he thought in that despair; ourn! mine and hisn both! He's
my father!) stood, but he could hear them, the two of them that is, because his father
had said no word yet:
"But what proof have you, Mr.
Harris?"
Okay, okay, so the
first sentence is not much of a stream. It's only 15 words. But those last two
sentences are long, coiling snakes. The second sentence is 118 words! It moves from
boy to cheese to cans to meat to fish to fear to grief to blood. It is spatial,
external, and internal description.
The third sentence is
61 words, including its jump off into dialogue. With its parentheses, triple
exclamations, internal ("ourn") and external dialogue ("But what proof...?"), the third
sentence is a little bit of everything. It's part third person, part Sarty in its point
of view.
Through Faulkner's use of synesthetic imagery, the
reader can smell, taste, and touch the tension in the setting, as we, like Sarty, begin
to feel surrounded and confused.
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