ABSTRACT
In the early part of the twentieth century, things got complicated for first-person fiction. Novelists made efforts to enter into the subjectivity of the narrator. Most wonderfully sustained, and successful, attempts to narrate fictional happenings from within the consciousness of the characters is James Joyce's Ulysses. The absence of punctuation is true to the immediacy of consciousness; there are no semicolons inside our thoughts. The inner monologues of the characters, and the attempts to present consciousness in a relatively unmediated way, are usually arias, against a recitative of straightforward, first- or third-person exposition. Some would deny that it is a novel at all, although compared with the metafictions and self-referential fictions and the non-referential texts that were so admired in the 1980s, it seems almost traditional. The ploys by which novelists try to persuade the authenticity and probability of a consciousness talking to itself, fall down because the consciousness has to explain things that it would not explain to itself.
