Knowra Stream of consciousness Stream of consciousness A literary technique that represents the shifting flow of a character’s thoughts and perceptions, often through associative, fragmented, or loosely ordered narration.
Interior monologue : A narrative mode that presents a character’s inner speech directly or in a close imitation. It is a common way to render thought within stream-of-consciousness writing.
William James : An American philosopher and psychologist whose writings helped shape modern accounts of consciousness. His phrase “stream of thought” gave the technique a formative psychological metaphor.
Ulysses : A 1922 novel by James Joyce that follows Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus through Dublin on a single day. Its shifting styles and extended interior monologues are landmark experiments in representing consciousness.
Stream of consciousness (psychology) : A psychological metaphor for the continuous, changing succession of conscious experience. The literary technique borrows its name from this psychological idea but is a crafted narrative form.
Narrative time : The ordering, duration, and frequency of events as presented in a narrative. Following consciousness loosened the link between story time and the order of telling.
Free indirect discourse : A narrative style that blends a character’s language and viewpoint with third-person narration without quotation marks or speech tags. It lets narration shift into a character’s perceptions without explicitly announcing the shift.
Édouard Dujardin : A French writer whose novel Les Lauriers sont coupés pioneered sustained interior monologue in fiction. His 1887 novel is an early landmark in representing continuous inner thought.
Mrs Dalloway : A 1925 novel by Virginia Woolf that follows Clarissa Dalloway and others through one day in London. Its movement among present perception, memory, and multiple minds exemplifies modernist consciousness-writing.
Epistolary novel : A novel told through documents such as letters, diary entries, or emails. Its thought is mediated by written documents, unlike the technique’s often immediate-seeming mental flow.
Psychological novel : A novel that gives sustained attention to characters’ motives, emotions, and inner lives. Stream of consciousness is one way the psychological novel makes inner life its subject.
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