In the decades that followed the First World War, Western literature was deeply influenced by the general intellectual climate of pessimism and alienation and the turn toward radical experimentation sweeping through the other arts. The great nineteenth-century novelists had typically written as all-knowing narrators, describing realistic characters and their relationships to an understandable, if sometimes harsh, society (see "Realism in Art and Literature" in Chapter 22). Modernist writers now developed new techniques to express new realities. In the twentieth century, many authors adopted the limited, often confused viewpoint of a single individual. Like Freud, they focused their attention on the complexity and irrationality of the human mind. French novelist Marcel Proust (1871–1922), in his semi-autobiographical Remembrance of Things Past (1913–1927), recalled bittersweet memories of childhood and youthful love and tried to discover their innermost meaning.

Some novelists used the stream-of-consciousness technique, relying on internal monologues to explore the human psyche. The English author Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) portrayed characters whose ideas and emotions from different periods of their lives bubble up as randomly as from a patient on a psychoanalyst’s couch. William Faulkner (1897–1962), one of America’s greatest novelists, used the same technique in The Sound and the Fury (1929), with much of its intense drama confusedly seen through the eyes of a man who is mentally challenged.

The most famous and perhaps most experimental stream-of-consciousness novel is Ulysses (1922) by Irish novelist James Joyce (1882–1941). Into an account of a single day in the life of an ordinary man, Joyce weaves an extended ironic parallel between the aimless wanderings of his hero through the streets and pubs of Dublin and the adventures of Homer’s hero Ulysses on his way home from Troy. Abandoning any sense of a conventional plot; breaking rules of grammar; and blending foreign words, puns, bits of knowledge, and scraps of memory together in bewildering confusion, Ulysses is intended to mirror modern life: a gigantic riddle impossible to unravel.

As creative writers turned their attention from society to the individual and from realism to psychological relativity, they rejected the idea of progress. With its biblical references, images of a ruined and wasted natural world, and general human incomprehension, T. S. Eliot’s (1888–1965) poem The Waste Land (1922) expressed the widespread despair that followed the First World War. The Czech writer Franz Kafka (1883–1924) likewise portrayed an incomprehensible, alienating world. Kafka’s novels The Trial (1925) and The Castle (1926) are stories about helpless individuals crushed by inexplicably hostile forces, as is his famous novella The Metamorphosis (1915), in which the main character turns into a giant insect. In these and many other works, authors between the wars used new literary techniques and dark imagery to capture the anxiety of the age.