Stream of consciousness, Interior monologue

Stream of consciousness is the term applied to any attempt by a writer to represent the conscious and subconscious thoughts and impressions in the mind of a character. This technique takes the reader inside the narrating character’s mind, where he sees the world of the story through the thoughts and senses of the local character. At the beginning of the twentieth century some authors, notably James Joyce. Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner, developed a stream of consciousness technique called interior monologue. The term is borrowed from drama, where monologue refers to the part in a play where an actor expresses his inner thoughts aloud to the audience. In fiction, an interior monologue is a record of a characters, thoughts and sense impressions.

As people do not think in complete, well-formed logical sentences, Joyce, Woolf and Faulkner abandoned traditional syntax, punctuation and logical connections in order to represent the flow of a character’s thoughts. For example, in Joyce' s Ulysses (1922) the reader finds himself with a transcript of one of the character’s thoughts which contains no commas, full stops or capital letters. The stop, start, disjointed and often illogical nature of interior monologue makes it a challenge for the reader to interpret.