[…] and O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and the pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

Set up:

These are the last (and perhaps most famous) lines of Ulysses—the protagonist's wife in lying in bed, thinking about the moment she accepted her husband's proposal. Oh, and this goes on at length. Without punctuation. We just gave you the tail end of Molly Bloom's monologue.

What's going on in this little tidbit of Joycean madness is just the tip of the stream of consciousness iceberg. But it also requires a little bit of background knowledge.

Things to know:

1. This is from the point of view of Molly Bloom, who's falling asleep.
2. Earlier in the day, Molly Bloom slept with a man other than her husband… yet she's falling asleep thinking of how much she loves her hubby.
3. James Joyce's wife, Nora Barnacle (coolest name, or coolest name?) was rumored to have slept with another dude early in their marriage, and James had a bit of a jealousy problem.

We'll save the first point for the stylistic analysis—stream of consciousness is, after all, a pretty stylin' style.

Let's look at the other two, though. So Ulysses is a pretty dude-centric work of literature. It's mainly about the trials and tribulations of one guy, named Leopold Bloom. He has a philandering wife named Molly, but he also has a slew of other problems—he's a Jewish man in fairly anti-Semitic Ireland, he's impotent(ish), and he's a frustrated creative stuck in advertising (and not in the slick Don Draper way).

And it's also (obliquely) about a dude named James Joyce, who, even though he wasn't Jewish or in advertising or impotent was terrified about his wife having cheated on them.

This last chapter gives both Leopold and James some resolution. Here is sleepy Molly, dreaming only of being young and in love with her darling husband. D'aww.

But what does this have to do with stream of consciousness? Well, everything, kind of. Stream of consciousness lets the reader (or writer) get so deeply inside the head of a character it's like living inside their skull. James got to work through his jealousy by showing a cheating wife still madly in lurve with her hubs. Leopold gets to be vindicated because the reader knows that his wife is still, in her heart of hearts, true to him.

Let's talk about the two factors at play in this quote. Molly is (a) falling asleep and (b) remembering. Those are two of the weirdest ways that thought can be patterned, right?

Fun tip: try asking questions to someone who is falling asleep. Bonus points if it's your little brother, sister, niece, or nephew. It goes something like this "Hey, hey Susie. What's going on?" "There is an elephant." "Oh really? What is he doing?" "Jumping over the cows." "What cows?" "Zzzz."

Sleepy people make no sense. People remembering things ramble. And what does this stream of consciousness passage of Ulysses do? It rambles in the semi-coherent, sleep-is-nigh way we all know so well. There is no punctuation (because when does falling asleep follow grammatical patterns?) and there is a graceful movement from memory to memory (because when does remembering follow an outline?).

It shows us, in language, exactly what we know to be true: falling asleep and remembering are beautiful, nonsensical, incredibly moving experiences. Yay, Jimmy Joyce. Yay, stream of consciousness. Yay, Modernism.