"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." a quote from David Foster Wallace's story "Good Old Neon" talks about how our minds are a giant web of fluid thoughts that not even us can stay caught up with. This thought is like Montaigne and some Austen's writing styles. Montaigne's essay were written in blurbs of what came to his mind making it hard to sometimes follow and jump topics. In Pride and Prejudice, we see and learn part of the story through the eyes of Elizabeth, where we get to see her thoughts jump from place to place; we also see the view point of the other narrator of the story, who knows what is going on and is unaffected by outside opinions.
Montaigne wrote his essays in the stream of conscious writing style. Foster talks about how we can keep up with what goes on in our minds because they are so complicated and fast paced. While reading the essays you can see the points where Montaigne forgets the point he was making, because will he was writing his mind moved onto the next point and he is forced to move on suddenly. Montaigne thought process is like a shock going through a spiders web, it can be following a straight path, but it gets to a point where it breaks off into eight new paths and he tries to keep the fluidity of the current, causing him to follow one new path.
Austen's characters are complicated, but can only see it one way with their simple ways. Elizabeth is constantly having to absorb her surroundings and react to what she believes is going on. This is shown when she assumes she know what kind of guy Darcy is, but as her mind processes his actions over the course of the book, it find his intentions behind his actions. Her mind is more complicated then she could have ever understood, but it is nothing like the other narrator of the book. This narrator oversaw all that was happening and had the capabilities to keep up with everything that was going on. It was all knowing and knew the past, present, and future outcomes of every action that happened. From the beginning of the story it knew what was going to happen by the end because of it capability to keep up with everything going on in its mind allowed it to intertwine the gaps in between the webs of conscious.
David Foster Wallace believed that the mind was so fast and complicated that one could not keep up with everything that was going on and that what they saw was only a droplet in a sea of their thoughts. Montaigne's essays and style of writing complemented Wallace's belief because Montaigne wrote in the stream of conscious style, meaning he wrote what ever thought was on his mind at the time and changed to the next as soon as his mind changed gears. Austen had two characters in her story that we could compare to this belief. Elizabeth was only following her initial thoughts, but overtime saw the course of everyone's actions and their reasoning. The unknown narrator on the other hand was all knowing and was able to follow all of his thought processes and was able to understand everything going on into deep detail.
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