In the modernist experimental research, fiction followed different paths. Modernists did not agree with the traditional idea of novel, which cannot give a realistic idea of life, since it neglected subjectivity and the true nature of life that could not be represented in linear terms as the intelligent reader can notice in V. Woolf’s extracts. In V. Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway the reader travels in space and time according to a subjective (the main character’s) order.

J. Joyce started his research with symbolic realism of Dubliners where the traditional idea of the hero is rejected in that the characters inhabiting Dubliners are simply a paradigm of the existential condition of the human being at the turn of the century. Differently from the traditional novel, that celebrated heroes, self-made men, people of success, the modernist novel could not cope with that idea, and history is no longer made of “great people of the past”, but rather the ordinary experience of human beings.

In the Common Reader, V. Woolf speaks of the novelist of the traditional mainstream as slaves, unable to give room to subjectivity, the private, intimate part of the individual thus highlighting the role of consciousness, one that disregards any concept of linear time to privilege the flux of thoughts, emotions, and private feelings that make up what V. Woolf calls the luminous halo.

In addition, narrative strategies like moments of being and epiphanies open up a space of fullness of revelation that allows the individual to come to terms with him/herself and the problems of reality.

If this is what life is like the novel is as to experiment with language to find out, to discover the real nature of existence. It follows that the narrator (the author of the traditional novel) loses his authorial role to give space to his/her character’s flow of thoughts, feelings and emotions. As a result, he is eclipsed, hidden behind some short conjunctions, tiny connectors that seem to bring readers directly into the mind of the character (the interior monologue is the medium) and language use resorts to free indirect speech, free indirect thought, the shift of point of view and similar technical devices. This is exactly what happens in the panorama of fictional research before a certain Mr. Joyce decides that all his life would focus on aesthetical research, one nourished by the philosophy of Walter Pater, the Oxford professor, whose reflections on time influenced all modernist thinkers and writer. It follows that there was a revival of interest in the Bildungsroman.

Gabriele D’Annunzio in Italy wrote Il Piacere, Oscar Wilde wrote The Picture of Dorian Gray, and James Joyce wrote The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Strangely enough, all the protagonists of such building novels focus on young people, something that in postmodern terns we would call “process of construction”.

Philosophy lies behind such Bildungsroman that is the narrator’s intent to reflect on the sense of life, of existence, of being. But still there is a central apposition of the narrator, so we cannot say they are really revolutionary experiments. They still conform to a linear concept of space and time, and conceive of existence in terms of a linear development.

Only a great writer would later realize that if you really wanted to adhere to life you have to adhere to the inner dimension of consciousness. Consciousness and its working do not follow chronology or any time order and the shower of thoughts, of atoms that bombard people’s mind come to all times (future, present and past) and from all spaces in different formats. They may be activated by memory, by an auditory stimulus, by a picture, a situation, an incident and many other ways. You can easily understand there is not at all any order as the one modernists were in love with and which they looked for so desperately.

Order had disappeared and they had remained displaced in chaotic world, where they felt lost. That is why great modernist writers, like J. Joyce, in their fiction celebrate the anti-hero, not the hero, the self-made man, that would now recall a pantomime rather than reality. This explains for the adoption of the stream of consciousness in his masterpiece, Ulysses.

Joyce’s experimentations disrupt syntax: there will be no syntax, no word order, no time reference, not any connection. Thoughts, feelings and emotions conjure up all that crosses consciousness. Punctuation will totally disappear and it follows that modernist Joyce conceives of a new role for the reader.

Joyce’s Ulysses, the triumph of the stream of consciousness, is extremely demanding on the part of the reader: he is asked to make sense of what he reads, but he is never guided; there is no eclipsed narrator, there is no punctuation to guide the beginning or the end of the sentence. He must do everything by himself; in short, he has to share the life, the fictional context of his writing.

But how does all this cohere? How such form of narration acquires his structure? It must resort to a sort of “glue”. He dares something nobody understands to give his experimental research unity.

Only T. S. Elliot was able to explain the sense of Joyce’s experiment: in a famous review he published, Ulysses’ order and myth, which appeared in The Dial in 1923, the poet explained the mystery of Joyce’s complex experiment. Joyce was interested in reflecting on life, existence, the nature of the human being, the sense of his design, and desperately tried to find the suitable language means that would allow him, a man of the 20^th century, to say that in language and through language, something that would anticipate the post-modern discovery that human being’s language is a construct.