Essay 2 Montaigne/Austen

The mind thinks faster than words can be written or spoken. The Essays of Michel de Montaigne provide a window into the soul of a man who is almost tortured by his own thoughts, allowing the reader to understand his viewpoints on various topics. This window is provided through the use of stream of consciousness, rhetorical questions, and other rhetorical strategies. The Essays of Michel de Montaigne use various rhetorical strategies to persuade the reader’s on his views of various tendencies of human nature.

Thoughts can pop into the mind randomly and in a moment’s notice they can be gone. This style of thinking is present in the Essays of Michel de Montaigne. Whatever came to his mind is what Montaigne wrote about, despite whether or not that thought had to do with the present topic. His use of stream of consciousness can be heavily confusing to the reader because reading the essays is like reading a road map that had directions but were somehow lost in the path to finding the destination. For example, Montaigne talks of drunkenness to begin with but ends with how are limits can be tested. For most, this essay would not make sense because they don’t have they can’t make the connections that Montaigne can make.

Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice offers a window into the soul of an 18^th century English women who must face patriarchy and society by using stream of consciousness and 3^rd person omniscient. While Austen does use the stream of consciousness technique like Montaigne, Austen is not trying to write a piece of rhetoric, she is writing a novel. Austen uses this technique to portray the inequalities of 18^th century England which allows her novel to be clearer than Montaigne’s essays. For example, Elizabeth has many thoughts after reading the letter Darcy gave to her explaining his reasons to the actions she hates him for. Her thought process, while jumbled, was clearly changing from hatred to love for Darcy. Elizabeth and Darcy change their thoughts for each other despite their class differences and despite her rambunctious personality.

The Essays of Michel de Montaigne and Pride and Prejudice use the stream of consciousness technique to convince the audience of their viewpoints (or themes) of their work, but by using this technique not everything that came to mind of the characters was written in a clear cut path causing the audience to become jumbled in their thoughts. Austen’s Pride and Prejudice seems to have a more distinct path because the stream of consciousness technique is aided by the presence of a third person omniscient narrator so the reader gains some context. The Essays of Michel de Montaigne are less distinct and proof that “What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant.”