Modernism is a cultural, cosmopolite current whose aim was to put up subjectivity. Writers are focused on conscious because the traditional novel couldn’t return a faithfully idea of life. In Virginia Woolf’s opinion the traditional novel isn’t able to convey what life is. Impressions comes to the mind in the shape of innumerable semitransparent atoms, as she called them. It follows that she adopted new techniques like the monologue, the shift of describing the moment of being, a metaphoric use of language reminding poetry this regarding chronological time arrangements. She prefers to follow the flashes of conscious going forward and backward in a simultaneous way (a typical concept of time in her work) where the present includes past memories and future aspects.

Beside Virginia Woolf, James Joyce  is considered the greatest novelist of the western world. He took the experimentation to the maximum. He was interested in conveying reality, as really it is and he adopted myth as the principal structure of his novel. Indeed the myth of Ulysses in Odyssey provides the content to give unity and organization to his masterpiece. What Joyce was trying to do was to render reality of his time in the most realistic way in you, that is why he adopted the total stream of consciousness technique. His prose is very complex: there are no connectors, no part connection, no paragraphs. According to the working of  stream of consciousness, conscious flows apparently in a circular way. He follows that the position of the reader becomes utmost; he is asked a lot. Indeed it is asked a lot to the reader who had to provide the logical and semantic connections to the flow of thoughts and words.

He also reduced the plot to the minimum, in fact what he was mainly interested was the inner life of his characters.

Ulysses was written in 1918, there are three characters: Leopold Bloom, his wife Penelope and Stephen Dedalus, a young man Leopold meets in Dublin’s, one of Dublin’s pubs. He tells a simply day in Dublin (the16^th June 1904) of the protagonist Stephen Dedalus, an arrogant poverty-stricken artist, an intellectual in spiritual exile from his country and family, seeking a father. While Leopold Bloom is a Jewish advertising space salesman; by virtue of being a Jewish he’s also in exile and he’s seeking a son. Leopold and Stephen represent, in essence, Telemachus and Ulysses. As Omer’s Odissey is a story of request, Joyce’s Ulysses, as a quest as a central theme for the day’s progress, also represent a journey.