This paper argues that the narrative techniques modernist writers devised in the early twentieth century to represent a psychologically fragmented, discontinuous, and internally plural self-anticipate—formally and philosophically—the conditions of self-representation that now govern digital culture. Reading canonical modernist experiments (the developing interior monologue of James Joyce, the multi-personal consciousness of Virginia Woolf, and the anxious, self-divided speaker of T. S. Eliot’s early verse) alongside contemporary theories of the “networked self” (Papacharissi, boyd, Marwick and boyd), the analysis identifies a genuine structural convergence: the social-media feed, the multi-platform profile, and the algorithmically curated timeline reproduce, in altered form, the fragmentation, interiority, temporal disorder, and multiplicity that modernism made into an aesthetic program. Yet the paper resists a simple equivalence. Where modernist fragmentation was a controlled authorial strategy that used a disintegrating surface to reach a deeper subjective truth, digital fragmentation is frequently involuntary, commodified, and algorithmically imposed, dispersing the self without the orchestrating consciousness that modernism preserved. The comparison thus illuminates both a continuity in how modernity conceives the subject and a decisive break in who—or what—now holds the fragments together
Modernism, Digital Identity, Fragmentation, Stream of Consciousness, Networked Self, Social Media, Algorithmic Culture, Remediation, Context Collapse, Polyphony, Temporal Montage, Free Indirect Discourse, Modernist Literature, Posthumanism, Self-Representation, Online Identity, Literary Theory, Media Studies, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot.
Muskaan. Narrating the Fragmented Self: Modernist Narrative Techniques and Contemporary Digital Identities. Indian Journal of Modern Research and Reviews. 2026; 4(7):109-113
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