The rules

For the modern reader it may seem like there are no rules left, and things might be better off with some rules. Everything is allowed- incomplete and run-on sentences, new words, optional grammar. This isn't new, rather the rules are from a brief interim. A few hundred years ago none of rules were codified. But we aren't back where we started, we've come to the point where the writer chooses. Everything is destroyed and now each builds individually.
Kingsley Amis said not to start two paragraphs in a row with the same word which at first seems capricious but then appealing. It is a shift from a rule of communication to a truer goal, aesthetics.

So what choices are writers making?

Bernard Malamud's The Tenants begins

Lesser catching sight of himself in his lonely glass wakes to finish his book. He smelled the living earth in the dead of winter. In the distance mournful blasts of a vessel departing the harbor. Ah, if I could go where it's going. He wrestles to sleep again but can't, unease like a horse dragging him by both bound legs out of bed. I've got to get up to write, otherwise there's no peace in me. In this regard I have no choice. “My God, the years.” He flings aside the blanket and standing unsteadily by the loose-legged chair that hold his clothes slowly draws on his cold pants. Today's another day.

It's easy not to focus on the “living earth” sentence. The purple prose initially pushed me off so it wasn't until now that I remembered there are no earth smells in a New York City tenement. There is rotten food, frying bacon, the many scents of air freshener, body odor, smoking reefer, and hair chemicals. Melted cheese, cigarettes, and one-note perfume.
I also admit to distrusting the horse analogy, which I imagine would cause heart-stopping fright rather than unease. The “lonely glass” was also confusing but I blamed it on myself. I assumed that a lonely glass was some other piece of home design that I was unfamiliar with like a sideboard or a bedstead. Or a poetic phrase for a mirror. The other idea is that it is a glass which is lonely, perhaps because it smells the living earth. But based on my glass looking experience I don't think you can see yourself in a glass from more than a few inches away.
The other thing about the paragraph is the voice changes. He and I are one. It's potentially confusing but there is opportunity here- the creation of two simultaneous streams: an intelligent outside 3rd person and the primitive id of the first. It's “he” who spots the "loose-legged chair" and “I” who has "no choice". The quotes in the third sentence from the end provide the final level, a 0th person. This is not how the character is feeling or what he does but a "literal" thought.
Despite my apprehension this goes down easily enough.

Tags: Books Stream of concious