Stream of Consciousness in the Novel «Robber and Dogs» by Najib Mahfouz

Stream of consciousness is a new style in narrating in which an author's role is minimized because thoughts and feelings of characters are expressed as flowing in their minds. In this method, a chronological, locational and logical order of events is cluttered and narrative techniques include inner monologue, self hadith, and wise speaker. The writers who used the technique in their works can be referred to as James Joyce, William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, etc. from the West; Najib Mahfouz, Ghassan Kanafani, Halim Barekat, etc. from the Arab world; and Sadeq Chubak, Abbas Maroufi, Hooshang Golshiri, etc. from Iran. The aim of this research is to criticize the novel "Robber and Dogs" by Najib Mahfouz using the criteria of the stream of consciousness and reach the conclusion that the author in the novel makes the transfer function of main parts of the story through talks, including the inner monologue, thereby letting the reader be informed directly and without the narrator's intervention of the stream of thoughts, and of hero's feelings in the story. He also shows the hero's character to addressees using various characteristics of the inner monologue like inner monologue's owner, neglecting agreed addressees, the way of characterizing, access to the hero's mind, synchronization phenomenon, and inner monologue types.