Richard Ellmann writes in “James Joyce In and Out of Art,” from Four Dubliners:
Joyce radicalized literature, so that it would never recover. He reconstructed narrative, both external and internal; he changed our conception of daytime consciousness and of nighttime unconsciousness. He made us reconsider language as the product and the prompter of unconscious imaginings. These did not come to him as experiments or as innovations; he did not regard himself as an experimenter. Rather they were solutions to the literary and intellectual problems he set himself.