Virginia Woolf says life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent one. It follows that she adopted new techniques like the interior monologue, the shift of point of view, the moment of being, a metaphorical use of language which reminds to the poetry, a not chronological time of events. She preferred to follow the fletches of conscious going forward and backwards in simultaneous concept of time (a typical concept of time) where the present includes past memories and future expectations .
Besides Virginia Woolf, James Joyce is considered the greatest novelist of the Western world in his time.
He was interested in conveying reality as it really is and he adopted myth as the structure in principal of his novel indeed the myth of Ulysses' Odyssey provides the content to give unity and organization to his master piece.
What James Joyce wanted to do was to render the reality of his time in the most realistic way in you; that is why HE ADOPTED THE TOTAL STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS TECHNIQUE.
He's very complex. There are no connectors, no punctuation, no paragraphs. According to the workings of a stream of consciousness, conscious flows in a circular way. It follows that the position of the reader becomes utmost important. He's asked a lot. He also reduces the plot to the minimum, to the inner life of his characters. Ulysses was written between 1914 and 1921 and it's about three characters: Leopold Bloom, his wife Penelope and Steven Dedalus, a young man he meets in a Dublin pub. Ulysses is set in a single day in Dublin, in June. The protagonist Steven Dedalus, an arrogant poverty streaked artist and intellectual in SPIRITUAL EXIL FROM HIS COUNTRY AND FAMILY. He's seeking a father while Leopold Bloom is a Jewish advertising-space salesman. By virtue of being a Jewish, also in exile, he's seeking a son. They represent, in essence, Thelemacus and Odysseus. As Omer's Odyssey is the story of a quest, Joyce's Ulysses has A QUEST AS A CENTRAL THEME. For the day progress it also represents a journey.