The main aim of Modernism is to put subjectivity at the centre of investigation. Writers focus their attention on consciousness and think that traditional novel can't return life, isn't able to convey what life is.

Virinia Woolf adopted new tecniques: interior monologue, sluft of point of view, moment of being and metaphorical use of language. Her novels hasn't a chronological time arrangement because she prefers to follow flashes of consciousness, going forward and backwords in a simultaneous concept of time where the present includes past memories and future expectation.

James Joyce

Besides V. Woolf, James Joyce is considered the greatest novelist of the Western World in his time. He took experimentation to the maximum. He was interested in conveying reality as it really is and adopted myth as the structuring principle of his novel. Indeed, the myth of Ulysses Odyssey provides the content to give unity and organization to his masterpiece. What Joyce was trying to do was to render the reality of his time in the most realistic way he knew; that's why he adopted the total stream of consciousness technique. His prose is very complex. There are no connectors, no puntuaction, no paragraph.

According to the workings of a stream of consciousness, conscious flows apparently in a circular way. It follows that the position of the reader becomes of utmost importance, he is asked a lot. Indeed, he 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 plot to the minimum in that what he was mainly interested in was the inner life of his characters.

Ulysses was written in 1922. It is about the life of three characters: Leopold Bloom, his wife Penelope and Stephen Dedalus , a young man he met in one of Dublin's pubs.

Ulysses is about a single day in Dublin in June 1904. The protagonist, S. Dedalus, is an arrogant poverty stricken artist and intellectual, in spiritual exile from his country and family. He is seeking a father while Leopold Bloom is a Jewish advertising-space salesman. By virtue of being a Jew, also in exile, he's seeking a sun. They represent, in essence, Telemachus and Odysseus.

As Omer's Odyssey is the story of a quest, Joyce's Ulysses has a quest as it central theme, for the day's progress also represents a journey.