Interior monologue

Interior monologue is a narrative technique that presents a character’s unspoken thoughts and perceptions, often with little or no explanatory narration.

Stream of consciousness: A literary mode that represents the continuous flow of a character’s thoughts, sensations, and associations. It broadens interior monologue into a sustained, often nonlinear rendering of mental experience.
Ulysses: James Joyce’s 1922 novel follows Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus through a day in Dublin. Its Molly Bloom episode is a celebrated extended interior monologue.
Édouard Dujardin: A French novelist whose 1887 novel Les Lauriers sont coupés pioneered sustained literary presentation of a character’s thoughts. His novel became an early model for interior monologue in fiction.
Focalization: The restriction or shaping of narrative information according to a particular character’s perception or knowledge. Interior monologue typically narrows narration to what a character thinks or perceives.
Free indirect discourse: A narrative mode that blends a character’s idiom and viewpoint into third-person narration without quotation or thought tags. It conveys private thought while retaining a narrator’s grammatical voice, unlike direct interior monologue.
Mrs Dalloway: Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel follows Clarissa Dalloway through one day in London. Its shifting access to private thought shows interior monologue within a wider narrative design.
James Joyce: An Irish novelist and poet whose formally innovative works include Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Joyce made interior monologue central to the structure and style of Ulysses.
Unreliable narrator: A narrator whose account readers have reason to doubt or reinterpret. A character’s unspoken thoughts can expose gaps between personal belief and narrated reality.
Soliloquy: A dramatic speech in which a character speaks thoughts aloud, commonly while alone onstage. It externalizes private thought as speech, whereas interior monologue presents it as unspoken.
To the Lighthouse: Virginia Woolf’s 1927 novel portrays the Ramsay family and their guests across two days and an intervening decade. Its transitions among characters’ perceptions demonstrate how interior monologue can move between minds.

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