Snow

Stream of consciousness is a writing style where a writer focuses more on the natural flow of thoughts and images in the brain instead of a coherent, structured narrative. When writing in a stream-of-consciousness style, a writer tries to turn off their conscious brain and simply let the images come to them. Some writers even use hypnosis to access this unconscious state. Jumps in time, scene, and character are common in stream-of-consciousness writings.

Stream-of-consciousness writing is typically a prose strategy. As a genre, it began in the late-19th and early-20th centuries, mainly as a response to some of the defining events of the time period, including the spread of Darwinism, the advent of Freudian psychology, the spread of industry and expansion of cities, and the onset of WWI. Early stream-of-consciousness novels focused on the mental progression, or stream, of characters in the text. Three renowned stream-of-consciousness writers were William Faulkner, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf. Particularly, Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927) provides a strong example of jumps in time and place in a stream-of-consciousness style.

In the middle of the 20th century, poets, musicians, and avant-garde writers like John Lennon, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg continued the tradition, often inducing their writing with psychedelics or marijuana. In the 1960s, the combination of the avant-garde with a stream-of-consciousness style and counterculture influence led to many poems, songs, and novels featuring mystical imagery. Some examples of this include Kerouac’s novel On the Road (1957) and Ginsberg’s poem “Howl” (1956).

“Snow” reads like a stream-of-consciousness poem with its breaks in space and time and the way the speaker’s memories jump between seemingly unrelated images.