As T.S. Eliot once said, “Every age gets the art it deserves and every age must accept the art it gets. A complex age like the 20th century, upset by two World Wars and marked by unrest and ferments, couldn’t as result produce anything but complex art, mainly resulting, more than in any previous age, from experimentation. The search for new forms of expression, which affected all branches of literature, was carried on first of all in fiction and novel. So far novelists had concentrated above all on plots, and their main preoccupation had been with characters in society, since they thought that the function of novels was to present people in a social context, so that they became mirrors of their own age. The English novel was essentially bourgeois in its origin and throughout the 18th and the 19th centuries it was firmly anchored in a social world. The novelist used to make digression, address the reader, comment on his own performance, and he was faced with a relatively easy task : he was expected to mediate between his characters and the reader, relating in a more or less objective way significant events and incidents in a chronological order. The existence of accepted social values and standards of behaviour led to the presentation of a social pattern which was familiar territory to both reader and writer. Naturalism brought nothing new from this point of view and the structure of the novel remained basically unaltered. In the 20th century, instead, preoccupation began to shift from society to man himself; characters became all important, because of their inner selves and not because of what was going on outside and around them. The novelist rejected omniscient narration and experimented new methods to portray the individual consciousness; the viewpoint shifted from the external world to the internal world of a character’s mind. The analysis of a character’s consciousness was influenced by the theories about the simultaneous…