This article is about the literary device. To read about the prewriting technique, see
Free writing.
In literary criticism, stream of consciousness is a narrative mode, or device, that seeks
"to depict the multitudinous thoughts and feelings which pass through the mind. Another
term for it is 'interior monologue'." The term was coined by William James in 1890 in
his The Principles of Psychology, and in 1918 May Sinclair first applied the term stream
of consciousness, in a literary context, when discussing Dorothy Richardson's novels.
Definition Stream of consciousness is a narrative device
that attempts to give the written equivalent of the character's thought processes, either
in a loose interior monologue, or in connection to his or her actions. Stream-of-consciousness
writing is usually regarded as a special form of interior monologue and is characterized
by associative leaps in thought and lack of some or all punctuation. Stream of consciousness
and interior monologue are distinguished from dramatic monologue and soliloquy, where the
speaker is addressing an audience or a third person, which are chiefly used in poetry or
drama. In stream of consciousness the speaker's thought processes are more often depicted
as overheard in the mind; it is primarily a fictional device.
The term "Stream of Consciousness" was coined by philosopher and psychologist William James
in The Principles of Psychology:
consciousness, then, does not appear to itself as chopped up in bits ... it is nothing joined;
it flows. A 'river' or a 'stream' are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described.
In talking of it hereafter, let's call it the stream of thought, consciousness, or subjective
life.
In the following example of stream of consciousness from James Joyce's Ulysses, Molly seeks sleep:
a quarter after what an unearthly hour I suppose they're just getting up in China now combing
out their pigtails for the day well soon have the nuns ringing the angelus they've nobody
coming in to spoil their sleep except an odd priest or two for his night office or the
alarmlock next door at cockshout clattering the brain out of itself let me see if I can
doze off 1 2 3 4 5 what kind of flowers are those they invented like the stars the wallpaper
in Lombard street was much nicer the apron he gave me was like that something only I
only wore it twice better lower this lamp and try again so that I can get up early.
Interior monologue While many sources use the terms stream of
consciousness and interior monologue as synonyms, the Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms suggests,
that "they can also be distinguished psychologically and literarily. In a psychological sense,
stream of consciousness is the subject‐matter, while interior monologue is the technique
for presenting it". And for literature ... "while an interior monologue always presents a character's
thoughts ‘directly’, without the apparent intervention of a summarizing and selecting
narrator, it does not necessarily mingle them with impressions and perceptions, nor does
it necessarily violate the norms of grammar, or logic- but the stream‐of‐consciousness
technique also does one or both of these things." Similarly the Encyclopædia Britannica Online,
while agreeing that these terms are "often used interchangeably," suggests, that "while
an interior monologue may mirror all the half thoughts, impressions, and associations that
impinge upon the character’s consciousness, it may also be restricted to an organized
presentation of that character’s rational thoughts".
Progress and use of the technique The beginnings to 1922
While the use of the narrative technique of stream of consciousness is usually associated
with modernist novelists in the first part of the twentieth-century, a number of precursors
have been suggested, including Laurence Sterne's psychological novel Tristram Shandy. In the
nineteenth-century it has been suggested that Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Tell-Tale
Heart" foreshadows this literary technique. Because of his renunciation of chronology
in favor of free association, Édouard Dujardin's Les Lauriers sont coupés is also an important
precursor. Indeed, the possibility of a direct influence is evoqued by James Joyce and Virginia
Woolf and having "picked up a copy of Dujardin's novel [ ... ] in Paris in 1903". There are
also those who point to Anton Chekhov's short stories and plays and Knut Hamsun's Hunger,
and Mysteries as offering glimpses of the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative
technique at the end of the nineteenth-century. Henry James has also been suggested as a significant
precursor, in a work as early as Portrait of a Lady.
However, it has been suggested that Arthur Schnitzler, in his short story '"Leutnant
Gustl", was in fact the first to make full use of the stream of consciousness technique.
But it is only in the twentieth-century that this technique is fully developed by modernists.
Marcel Proust is often presented as an early example of a writer using the stream of consciousness
technique in his novel sequence À la recherche du temps perdu, but Robert Humphrey comments,
that Proust "is concerned only with the reminiscent aspect of consciousness" and, that he "was
deliberately recapturing the past for the purpose of communicating; hence he did not
write a stream-of consciousness novel". The term was first applied in a literary context
in The Egoist, April 1918, by May Sinclair, in relation to the early volumes of Dorothy
Richardson's novel sequence Pilgrimage. Another early example is the use of interior
monologue by T. S. Eliot in his poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", a work probably
influenced by the narrative poetry of Robert Browning, including "Soliloquy of the Spanish
Cloister". 1922 to the 21st century
Possibly the most famous use of the technique came in 1922 with the publication of James
Joyce's Ulysses. Prominent uses in the years that followed include Italo Svevo in La coscienza
di Zeno, Virginia Woolf in Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse and William Faulkner in
The Sound and the Fury. Though Randell Stevenson suggests, that "interior monologue, rather
than stream of consciousness, is the appropriate term for the style in which [subjective experience]
is recorded, both in The Waves and in Woolf's writing generally.
Samuel Beckett, a friend of James Joyce, uses interior monologue in novels like Molloy,
Malone meurt and L'innommable. and the short story From an Abandoned Work.
The technique continued to be used into the 1970s in a novel such as Robert Anton Wilson/Robert
Shea collaborative Illuminatus!, with regard to which The Fortean Times warns readers,
to "[b]e prepared for streams of consciousness in which not only identity but time and space
no longer confine the narrative". With regard to Salman Rushdie one critic comments,
that "[a]ll Rushdie's novels follow an Indian/Islamic storytelling style, a stream-of-consciousness
narrative told by a loquacious young Indian man".
Other writers who use this narrative device include Sylvia Plath in The Bell Jar, Irvine
Welsh in Trainspotting, and Terry McMillan in her novel How Stella Got Her Groove Back.
Stream of consciousness literature in the 21st century
Stream of consciousness continues to appear in contemporary literature. Dave Eggers, author
of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, according to one reviewer, "talks much as
he writes - a forceful stream of consciousness, thoughts sprouting in all directions". Novelist
John Banville describes Roberto Bolaño's novel Amulet, as written in "a fevered stream
of consciousness". The first decade brought further exploration, including Jonathan Safran
Foer's Everything is Illuminated and many of the short stories of American author Brendan
Connell. See also
Stream of consciousness Free writing
Free indirect speech Internal monologue
Modernist literature Notes
References Cohn, Dorrit. Transparent Minds: Narrative
Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction, 1978.
Joyce, James. Ulysses, 1922; rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986.
Friedman, Melvin. Stream of Consciousness: A Study in Literary Method, 1955.
Humphrey, Robert. Stream of Consciousness in the Modern Novel, 1954.
Randell, Stevenson. Modernist Fiction: An Introduction. Lexington: University of Kentucky,
1992. Sachs, Oliver. "In the River of Consciousness."
New York Review of Books, 15 January 2004. Shaffer, E.S.. Comparative Criticism, Volume
4. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 119. Retrieved 12 Jan 2011.
Tumanov, Vladimir. Mind Reading: Unframed Direct Interior Monologue in European Fiction.
Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 1997. Googlebooks.