stream of consciousness

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

a narrative technique that attempts to render the continuous, associative flow of a character's thoughts, perceptions, memories, and feelings as they occur in real time, without the ordering or explanatory interventions of conventional prose narration, seeking to capture the pre-linguistic texture of mental life rather than its retrospective reconstruction; the term derives from the psychologist William James's description of consciousness as a stream rather than a chain of discrete states, and was developed as a literary technique by writers including James Joyce — most fully in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake — Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson, and William Faulkner; stream of consciousness writing characteristically features fragmented syntax, free association between disparate memories and perceptions, dissolution of conventional time ordering, and a blurring of the boundary between inner experience and outer event that challenged early twentieth century readers accustomed to the conventions of realist narration