Blog Post #30 - Stream of consciousness

Stream of consciousness is a device that acts as a mode of narration. The stream of consciousness aims to reproduce the continuous flow of a single character’s mental thoughts and processes. This is where sense perception fuses with memories, expectations, conscious thoughts and feelings. This style of writing is used throughout the thief and the dogs originally written by Naguib Mahfouz. The Thief and the Dogs was initially written in Arabic and was the start of this style of writing within the Arabic culture, which is seen in the interior monologue of Said Mahran, when we see his thoughts and emotions take over for a small period of time. This is seen at the start of the story when Said displays his internal thoughts regarding a few past events in his life.

Another case where we can see Said looks back on how he feels betrayed by his past mentor Rauf Ilish, his past friend who married his wife Ilish Sidra, and finally his ex-wife Nabawiyya. as Said reflects on his emotions, he is explicitly seen portraying Rauf as someone who has made a significant impact on his life and he is often seen looking at Rauf as a person who he can trust and rely on to have his back no matter how Rauf felt about the situation. Because of how the stream of consciousness has been used in the story, Said is able to leave a bigger impact on the audience, as the story goes on, and as the realization of betrayal is expressed by Said sets in to the audience. This feeling of betrayal was stronger in his description of Nabawiyya, and this is because of the feelings of happiness and romantic he once had towards her, as he described his previous interactions with Nabawiyya. through Nabawiyya’s betrayal, there is a sense of employment in Said’s stream of thought, which occurs because of how Mahfouz easily moves between the past and current description of Said’s life.

In addition, we can see that an image of each character has been developed from a singular perspective being shown from Said, as this further shows a stronger use of the stream of consciousness throughout the story as each of the characters can be viewed by how Said portrays them to be, through his description of the character. Said’s description of the characters in the story, are highly influenced by his experiences of betrayal by his closest friends and ex-wife.

If Said were to have thought of his actions in more detail, we would perhaps have noticed that they would have been less detrimental and damaging. This could also be seen for Rauf Ilwan, as he could perhaps have betrayed his old morals of burglary to protect himself against life in prison. Illish Sidra, may have treated Nabawiyya with more sympathy, making it so that Nabawiyya would be more attracted to him, which would have resulted in her not remarrying, whilst still married to her husband who was in prison.

From this, it could have meant that he would stand out as more of an ideal father figure to Sana compared to Said. Throughout the story, we see the plot develop from what Said perspective, as an aggressive person. From this it can be inferred that Illish like Rauf preferred a life without crime, but sometimes things are done without complete thought.