Modernism is a cultural movement which covered the first three decades of the 20ieth century.

It is characterized by a rejection of Victorian principals especially it refused the idea that art should teach moral and be useful.

Later Modernism also involved other aspects from economy to religion, from science to literature.

At the economical level modernization had been so successful in countries such as France, Japan, Germany and U.S.A. and started a competition for the control of international trades and Japan and U.S.A. took the place until that time played by France and England; this atmosphere of tension created defensive alliances.

In 1914 the first World War represented a turning point in the world's history.

Economical depression also caused unemployment and made people understand that progress had not produced well being and demonstrated that the economical policy "laissez-fair" would not be the answer and that the government should exercised some control, paved the way for the economical policy later so called "Welfare State".

Some people decided that was the moment to do what Marx wrote in his Communist Manifesto of the 1848: to take power away from the middle classes. An example came in 1917 with Lenin and the Bolshevik revolution: the Bolshevik party took the control of the Russian state.

In science Darwin's theory about the natural selection made people understand that men were not the product of God but the result of a long process.

Also Einstein's General Relativity theory changed the way that man perceived time and space around him: time and space had not to be considered as separate entities, they are correlated and depended by the point of view of the watcher, they are relative.

In addition also Euclidean geometry and Newtonian physic were revalued (the basis of traditional science).

All this discoveries made people understand they were alone, there was not a God above them who gave rules he had to find a moral code for himself in a relative reality.

In philosophy Mr. Bergson affirmed that present is the result of our past memories and future expectations: this sum represents the so called "stream of consciousness" and determinates what do we think.

In literary we see a new kind of novel: in the 19^th century novel was characterized by a narrative structure whit dialogues, character's descriptions, flashbacks and so on and it was characterized by an omniscient narrator who gave moral judgments; in the new novel there is no narrator, characters told the story by their point of view and this implied that the reader was free to make personal considerations.

The author used two narrative techniques: the stream of consciousness and the interior monologue.

The stream of consciousness is determinate by past memories and future expectations and influenced in this way what does character think.

On the other side the interior monologue is used when we are inside character's mind and we analyze what does he think, the stream of thoughts.