stream of consciousness

Narrative technique in which a writer presents directly the uninterrupted flow of a character's thoughts, impressions, and feelings, without the conventional devices of dialogue and description. It first came to be widely used in the early 20th century. Leading exponents have included the novelists Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and William Faulkner.

Molly Bloom's soliloquy in Joyce's Ulysses is a good example of the technique. The English writer Dorothy Richardson (1873–1957) is said to have originated the technique in her novel sequence Pilgrimage, the first volume of which was published 1915 and the last posthumously. The term ‘stream of consciousness’ was introduced by the philosopher William James 1890.