Modernism is a cosmopolitan cultural movement so mentality of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce is inclusive, they include also experiences of others. So, there is necessity of new narrative techniques for express this, because the traditional novel does not express the true life. The new techniques are used for express the life as they see it.

That's why the modernist novel is focused on the subjectivity, feelings, emotions, fears, thoughts. There is attention to the character's interiority and its conscience that is influenced by surrounding. So, the vision of man is changed. It is not anymore a perfect person and hero(typical vision of traditional novel), but the man is seen as anti-hero.

So the aim of modernist novelist is to express the stream of consciousness of their characters. Virginia Woolf adopts the interior monologue and the free indirect style in order to express it. There are also other narrative techniques: 3^rd person omniscient narrator, eclipse of the narrator, shift of point of view that allow the reader to be in contact with characters interiority. While Virginia Woolf uses connectors to separate inner and external time, James Joyce does not use them. He adopts the stream of consciousness technique, also called total stream of consciousness because there are not logical connectors, so the reading and the comprehension of his novels are very difficult and the reader is asked to find and to interpret semantical links between the words through the technique of juxtaposition. So the role of the reader is very demanding because he must cooperate with text. The language used by James Joyce is the language of sense because modernist writers want to make reader see,hear,smell etc.

In The Dead the characters are anti-heroes, there are characterized by both physical and mental paralysis, they are not able to act, to change anything and it is expressed through the symbolic realism. The is more in other person than what it appear to be.

James Joyce used also classical tradition for write Ulysses but his novel is different because he adopted new narrative techniques.The difficulty of reading Ulysses is also highlighted by T.S. Eliot. The myth of Ulysses is the structural element of his novel and this is also a new technique adopted by James Joyce, mythical method, that gives an organization to the huge drama of contemporary life. This also allowed the writer to make a parallel with the Ulysses.