Western literature was also influenced by the general intellectual climate of pessimism, relativism, and alienation. Nineteenth-century novelists had typically written as all-knowing narrators, describing realistic characters in an understandable, if sometimes harsh, society. In the twentieth century many writers adopted the limited, often confused viewpoint of a single individual. Like Freud, these novelists focused on the complexity and irrationality of the human mind.

Some novelists used the stream-of-consciousness technique with its reliance on internal monologues to explore the psyche. The most famous stream-of-consciousness novel is Ulysses, published by Irish novelist James Joyce (1882–1941) in 1922. Into an account of a single day in the life of an ordinary man, Joyce weaves an extended ironic parallel between his hero’s aimless wanderings through Dublin’s streets and pubs and the adventures of Homer’s hero Ulysses on his way home from Troy. Abandoning conventional grammar and blending foreign words, puns, bits of knowledge, and scraps of memory together in bewildering confusion, the language of Ulysses was intended to mirror modern life itself.

Creative writers rejected the idea of progress; some even described “anti-utopias,” nightmare visions of things to come. In 1918 Oswald Spengler (1880–1936) published The Decline of the West, in which he argued that Western civilization was in its old age and would soon be conquered by East Asia. Likewise, T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) depicted a world of growing desolation in his famous poem The Waste Land (1922). Franz Kafka’s (1883–1924) novels The Trial (1925) and The Castle (1926) portrayed helpless individuals crushed by inexplicably hostile forces.