essay on stream of consciousness technique

Stream of Consciousness

Stream of consciousness definition.

The literary device stream of consciousness is the continuous flow of thoughts of a person and recorded, thereof, in literature as they occur. In other words, it means to capture a continuous stream of thoughts into words and then scribble them on paper for others to read. This device is used as a noun . The term was first used by a psychologist, William James, in his work published in 1890.

“… it is nothing joined; it flows. A ‘river’ or a ‘stream’ is 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.” – William James from The Principles of Psychology .

Another appropriate term for this device is “interior monologue ,” where the individual thought processes of a character , associated with his or her actions, are portrayed in the form of a monologue that addresses the character itself. Therefore, it is different from the “ dramatic monologue ” or “ soliloquy ,” where the speaker addresses the audience or the third person.

Difference Between Stream of Consciousness and Free Writing

Stream of consciousness and free writing seems the same. However, the stream of consciousness is a literary activity in which the character is planned, sketched, and then thoughts are scribbled afterward. In freewriting, it is specific, planned, and topic-centered. It is non- fiction as well as a fictional activity. On the other hand, the stream of consciousness in literature writing is character-specific and objective-oriented. Yet, in one way, both are similar in that both need a free mind to write on some topic which in the case of fiction could be a character while in the case of free writing could be a non-fictional essay .

Difference between Traditional Prose and Stream of Consciousness:

Syntax : Syntax in traditional prose is correct, has an appropriate structure, and is to the point, while it could be choppy, poor, and even wrong in the case of a stream of consciousness.
Grammar: There is no sense of grammar in the stream of consciousness writing when it is jumbled up or the mind is in a state of flux. However, it is correct, pure, and exact in traditional prose.
Association: Traditional prose has some association with the general world while the stream of consciousness is removed from reality and is associated with the mind of the character.
Repetition : Traditional prose is not repetitious unless it is rhetoric , while the writing in a stream of consciousness could be repetitious to the point of annoyance.
Plot Structure: The plot is structureless in the case of a stream of consciousness, while in the case of traditional prose, it is well organized.

How to Write Stream of Consciousness?

A writer must keep the following points in mind when writing in a stream of consciousness style .

It must be character-specific.
It must sync with the character’s world; profession, relations, work, near and dear ones, and even daily activities .
It must seem to follow the thoughts of that person.
It must have some links and pieces of evidence of the thought process.
It must not have a structure, grammar, or any other formal linguistic evidence unless it is recorded for an educational academic.

Examples of Stream of Consciousness in Literature

The stream of consciousness style of writing is marked by the sudden rise of thoughts and lack of punctuation . The use of this narration style is generally associated with the modern novelist and short story writers of the 20th century. Let us analyze a few examples of the stream of consciousness narrative technique in literature:

Example #1 Ulysses by James Joyce

James Joyce successfully employs the narrative mode in his novel Ulysses , which describes a day in the life of a middle-aged Jew, Mr. Leopold Broom, living in Dublin, Ireland. Read the following excerpt:

“He is young Leopold, as in a retrospective arrangement, a mirror within a mirror (hey, presto!), he beholdeth himself. That young figure of then is seen, precious manly, walking on a nipping morning from the old house in Clambrassil to the high school, his book satchel on him bandolier wise, and in it a goodly hunk of wheaten loaf, a mother’s thought.”

These lines reveal the thoughts of Bloom, as he thinks of the younger Bloom. The self-reflection is achieved by the flow of thoughts that takes him back to his past.

Example #2 Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

“What a lark! What a plunge! For so it always seemed to me when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which I can hear now , I burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as I then was) solemn, feeling as I did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen …”

Another 20th-century writer that followed James Joyce ’s narrative method was Virginia Woolf. By voicing her internal feelings, Ms. Woolf gives freedom to the characters to travel back and forth in time. Mrs. Dalloway went out to buy flowers for herself, and on the way her thoughts move through the past and present, giving us an insight into the complex nature of her character.

Example #3 The British Museum Is Falling Down by David Lodge

“It partook, he thought, shifting his weight in the saddle, of metempsychosis, the way his humble life fell into moulds prepared by literature. Or was it, he wondered, picking his nose, the result of closely studying the sentence structure of the English novelists? One had resigned oneself to having no private language any more, but one had clung wistfully to the illusion of a personal property of events. A find and fruitless illusion, it seemed, for here, inevitably came the limousine, with its Very Important Personage, or Personages, dimly visible in the interior. The policeman saluted, and the crowd pressed forward, murmuring ‘Philip’, ‘Tony’, ‘Margaret’, ‘Prince Andrew’.”

We notice the use of this technique in David Lodge’s novel The British Museum Is Falling Down. It is a comic novel that imitates the stream of consciousness narrative techniques of writers like Henry James, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf. We see the imitation of the typical structure of the stream-of-conscious narrative technique of Virginia Woolf. We notice the integration of the outer and inner realities in the passage that is so typical of Virginia Woolf, especially the induction of the reporting clauses “he thought,” and “he wondered,” in the middle of the reported clauses.

Example #4 Notes from The Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky

I have been going on like that for a long time—twenty years. Now I am forty. I used to be in the government service, but am no longer. I was a spiteful official. I was rude and took pleasure in being so. I did not take bribes, you see, so I was bound to find a recompense in that, at least. (A poor jest , but I will not scratch it out. I wrote it thinking it would sound very witty; but now that I have seen myself that I only wanted to show off in a despicable way, I will not scratch it out on purpose!)

This passage can be found at the beginning of the novel. The protagonist of the novel narrates how he has passed more than four decades of his life as it is and has been expelled from the government service. The first-person narration shows his thoughts converted into words. However, the novel was written in Russian and translated into English. Hence, grammar, syntax , and style do not seem to follow the same pattern. However, the monologue occurs in the consciousness of a person.

Example #5 As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

“Well, it isn’t like they cost me anything,” I say. I saved them out and swapped a dozen of them for the sugar and flour. It isn’t like the cakes cost me anything, as Mr Tull himself realises that the eggs I saved were over and beyond what we had engaged to sell, so it was like we had found the eggs or they had been given to us. “She ought to taken those cakes when she same as gave you her word,” Kate says. The Lord can see into the heart. If it is His will that some folks has different ideas of honesty from other folks, it is not my place to question His decree.”

These passages are borrowed from As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner . Cora narrates how she has saved something sugar and floor and that Mr. Tull has made her realize that the eggs are now finished. In the next passage, Kate also adds to things that are coming into their stream of consciousness. This stream of consciousness shows, somewhat, sophisticated thoughts with good wording, good grammar, and good sentence structure.

Example #6 On the Road by Jack Kerouac

During the following week, he confided in Chad King that he absolutely had to learn how to write from him; Chad said I was a writer and he should come to me for advice. Meanwhile Dean had gotten a job in a parking lot, had a fight with Marylou in their Hoboken apartment – God knows why they went there – and she was so mad and so down deep vindictive that she reported to the police some false trumped-up hysterical crazy charge, and Dean had to lam from Hoboken. So he had no place to live. He came right out to Paterson, New Jersey, where I was living with my aunt, and one night while I was studying there was a knock on the door, and there was Dean, bowing, shuffling obsequiously in the dark of the hall, and saying, «Hello, you remember me – Dean Moriarty? I’ve come to ask you to show me how to write.

This passage, though, has good punctuation, and good wording gives the impression that Sal Paradise shows his understanding of different things and how his mind moves from Chad to Dean and vice versa with different places and persons coming in quick succession. This shows a beautiful example of the stream of consciousness.

Function of Stream of Consciousness

Stream of consciousness is a style of writing developed by a group of writers at the beginning of the 20th century. It aimed at expressing in words the flow of characters’ thoughts and feelings in their minds. The technique aspires to give readers the impression of being inside the minds of the characters. Therefore, the internal view of the minds of the characters sheds light on the plot and motivation in the novel.

Synonyms of Stream of Consciousness

Stream of Consciousness has no other word or phrase as an exact meaning. However, the following words can be used interchangeably in general meanings such as apostrophe , association of ideas, chain of thought, interior monologue, monologue, aside , or a soliloquy.

essay on stream of consciousness technique

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What is Stream of Consciousness? | Definition & Examples

"what is stream of consciousness": a guide for english students and teachers.

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Guide to Literary Terms

What is Stream of Consciousness? - Transcript (English and Spanish Subtitles Available in Video, Click HERE for Spanish Transcript)

By Liz Delf , Oregon State University Senior Instructor of Literature

12 Nov. 2019

Stream of consciousness is a narrative style that tries to capture a character’s thought process in a realistic way. It’s an interior monologue, but it’s also more than that. Because it’s mimicking the non-linear way our brains work, stream-of-consciousness narration includes a lot of free association, looping repetitions, sensory observations , and strange (or even nonexistent) punctuation and syntax —all of which helps us to better understand a character’s psychological state and worldview. It’s meant to feel like you have dipped into the stream of the character’s consciousness—or like you’re a fly on the wall of their mind.

Authors who use this technique are aiming for emotional and psychological truth: they want to show a snapshot of how the brain actually moves from one place to the next. Thought isn’t linear, these authors point out; we don’t really think in logical, well-organized, or even complete sentences.

For example, on my way to record this video, I didn’t think “Ah, now I am walking to the library. When I get there, I will say good morning to the videographer, and then begin recording. I hope it goes well.”

A more accurate representation might be more like this: “cold / bright / wish I had my sunglasses / walk faster / late again / always late / did I send my script? / should I have practiced more? / oh hi Dylan / which class was he in? / shoe’s untied / ooh colors trees red orange bright / faster / late late late / so bright”

stream_of_consciousness_shoe.jpg

That more realistic, stream-like, associative thought process is what authors are aiming for when they use stream of consciousness narration.

Here’s a literary example from Mrs. Dalloway , by Virginia Woolf:

stream_of_consciousness_woolf.jpg

“For having lived in Westminster—how many years now? Over twenty,--one feels even in the midst of the traffic, or waking at night, Clarissa was positive, a particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense (but that might be her heart, affected, they said, by influenza) before Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable.”

This passage is about Clarissa Dalloway’s connection to the city, linking her own heartbeat to the clock’s chimes. But it’s also a good example of stream of consciousness: it has associative thoughts (moving from the clock chimes to her influenza), unusual syntax (all those semi-colons !), and sensory details (like sound, music, and the feeling of a heartbeat).

Virginia Woolf is particularly well known for this narrative technique, along with some other modernist heavy hitters like James Joyce, William Faulkner, and Marcel Proust. Those particular authors were writing in the 1920s and 30s, but stream-of-consciousness isn’t limited to a particular time period or literary movement. It’s unusual, but it has been used by authors like Ken Kesey and Sylvia Plath in the 1960s, as well as Irvine Welsh, George Saunders, and Jonathan Safran Foer in the last decade or so.

Here’s one more example, this one from Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved :

“the air is heavy / I am not dead / I am not / there is a house / there is what she whispered to me / I am where she told me / I am not dead / I sit / the sun closes my eyes / when I open them I see the face I lost / Sethe’s is the face that left me / Sethe sees me see her and I see the smile / her smiling face is the place for me / it is the face I lost / she is my face smiling at me”

stream_of_consciousness_morrison.jpg

This example is even more disjointed than the first, and that’s a key element of understanding this particular character. The speaker (Beloved) is childlike, ghostly, scared, and confused. Her agitated repetition of “I am not dead” makes it feel like she’s desperately holding onto life, and the many echoes of Sethe’s smiling face show the emotional resonance and importance that image carries for Beloved.

Association is also prominent in this example, moving from the house to the sun to the eyes to Sethe’s face. And how about that syntax?! This particular character’s thoughts are so fluid and stream-like that there is no punctuation at all. This adds to the urgency of the passage, the fear, and, finally, the hope.

Want to cite this?

MLA Citation: Delf, Elizabeth. "What is Stream of Consciousness?" Oregon State Guide to English Literary Terms, 12 Nov. 2019, Oregon State University, https://liberalarts.oregonstate.edu/wlf/what-stream-consciousness. Accessed [insert date].

Further Resources for Teachers

William Faulkner's "Barn Burning" offers a short glimpse into the young boy Sarty's "stream-of-consciousness" thought processes. At the start of the story, Sarty identifies the man who tries to prosecute his pyromaniac father as his "father's enemy" before thinking " our enemy...ourn! mine and hisn both! He's my father! "

Writing Prompt: How does the form of Sarty's thoughts relate to the stream-of-consciousness form described in the above video? What anxieties or tensions does this repetition reveal in Sarty's worldview, and how do these tensions foreshadow later elements in the plot?

Interested in more video lessons? View the full series:

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stream of consciousness

What is stream of consciousness definition, usage, and literary examples, stream of consciousness definition.

Stream of consciousness (stuhREEM uhv CAHN-shush-niss) is a narrative technique that imitates the nonlinear flow of thought. The term originates from 19th-century psychology and later became associated with literature as psychological theories began to influence late 19th- and early 20th-century fiction.

The History of Stream of Consciousness

The term originated in William James’s 1890 book The Principles of Psychology , in which he compares thought to a stream. At the time, the contemporary belief was that thought worked as an organized chain.

Stream of consciousness, however, was already emerging in literature before James’s text; it appeared in works like Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy , Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Anna Karenina . However, the technique wouldn’t come to prominence until it began appearing throughout modern literature as psychology became a subject of interest to early 20th-century writers.

Irish author James Joyce is a notable proponent of this technique, using it in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man , Ulysses , and Finnegan’s Wake . Other authors of the time, like Virginia Woolf, used stream of consciousness as well. The technique’s relevance progressed into the second half of the 20th century and into the present day. More contemporary works that utilize the technique include Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar , Toni Morrison’s Beloved , Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting , and Brendan Connell’s The Life of Polycrates and Other Stories for Antiquated Children .

Elements of Stream of Consciousness

Stream of consciousness is characterized by its lack of linearity, which is evident in the technique’s grammar and word order, ambiguous transitions , repetition, and nonlinear plot structure or narration. Since stream of consciousness is meant to depict thought, we experience it every day. Stream of consciousness may appear as follows:

“Look at that kitten sitting on the bin outside. Did I sort through the recycling—crap, I think I threw away my debit card this morning before breakfast I really want a coffee now.”

In the example, thoughts are only loosely connected, change abruptly, and appear as run-on sentences to show the unbroken flow between the thoughts.

Why Writers Use Stream of Consciousness

This technique can depict the chaotic and disorganized nature of human thought. As a result, readers witness the complexity of characters’ minds in real time, allowing a clearer view of characters’ emotional and psychological state. This develops the reader’s connection to the character and makes the reader pay close attention to the character’s disjointed thoughts to better understand them.

Stream of Consciousness vs. Internal Monologue

Internal monologues and stream of consciousness are similar in concept but distinct in execution. Both involve internal thoughts, but while stream of consciousness renders the messy, fragmented human thought process, internal monologues follow traditional grammatical and structural rules to maintain full. Stream of consciousness thus seeks to let the audience experience what the character is thinking or feeling as it naturally occurs, whereas internal monologues are explicit, coherent statements of what the character is thinking or feeling.

Stream of Consciousness vs. Freewriting

Freewriting is an idea-generating technique that writers use to combat writers’ block. In an effort to spark creativity, writers will jot down anything that comes to mind rather than attempt to coherently organize their thoughts at the beginning of the writing process. Freewriting is similar to stream of consciousness in that the ideas are written down as they come to the writer organically.

However, after freewriting, writers are meant to sort through this material to find useable content that can be turned into a story. Stream of consciousness, on the other hand, is an aspect of a finished story—although the writer has created the effect of nonlinear thought, the precise wording and structure of these thoughts are purposeful.

Writers Known for Stream of Consciousness

Some writers most known for this technique are Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, William Faulkner, and Marcel Proust, though other prominent writers who have used this technique include Sylvia Plath and Jonathan Safran Foer.

Examples of Stream of Consciousness in Literature

1. James Joyce, Ulysses

In this excerpt, Leopold Bloom’s thoughts transition to his younger self:

He is young Leopold, as in a retrospective arrangement, a mirror within a mirror (hey, presto!), he beholdeth himself. That young figure of then is seen, precious manly, walking on a nipping morning from the old house in Clambrassil to the high school, his book satchel on him bandolier wise, and in it a goodly hunk of wheaten loaf, a mother’s thought.

Joyce accomplishes this transition by creating a continuous narrative flow of Bloom’s thoughts to his past experiences, bringing the reader along for his mental journey back in time.

2. Toni Morrison, Beloved

In this excerpt, Beloved is frantically clinging to life:

I am alone I want to be the two of us I want the join I come out of blue water after the bottoms of my feet swim away from me I come up I need to find a place to be the air is heavy I am not dead I am not there is a house there is what she whispered to me I am where she told me I am not dead I sit the sun closes my eyes when I open them I see the face I lost Sethe’s is the face that left me Sethe sees me see her and I see the smile her smiling face is the place for me it is the face I lost she is my face smiling at me

Beloved’s fear of death and desire to be with Sethe are communicated through disjointed, unpunctuated, and repetitive thoughts. The use of stream of consciousness underscores her panic and urgent desire to see Sethe.

3. T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

In this excerpt, Eliot’s speaker jumps from one thought to the next as he considers mortality:

I grow old … I grow old …

I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?

I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me.

As the speaker struggles to understand death, he attempts to communicate his state of mind, and his flow of thoughts jump from one subject to the next.

Further Resources on Stream of Consciousness

Oregon State University has a concise YouTube video on the topic.

The School of Life has also created a video on the topic with additional examples.

Related Terms

Freewriting
Internal Monologue
Perspective

English Studies

This website is dedicated to English Literature, Literary Criticism, Literary Theory, English Language and its teaching and learning.

Stream of Consciousness: A Literary Device

Stream of Consciousness is a literary narrative technique that aims to depict the continuous, unfiltered flow of thoughts, feelings, and perceptions within a character’s mind in real-time.

Etymology of Stream of Consciousness

Table of Contents

The term “Stream of Consciousness” in the context of literary technique originated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, primarily associated with the works of authors such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. The etymology of this phrase is rooted in psychology and philosophy.

It reflects the idea of capturing the continuous flow of thoughts, feelings, and perceptions within an individual’s mind as they occur, much like a stream that flows uninterrupted. Stream of consciousness as a narrative style seeks to delve deep into the inner workings of characters’ minds, offering readers a direct, unfiltered glimpse into their inner thoughts and experiences.

This literary technique serves to explore the complexities of human consciousness and the subjective nature of perception, allowing for a deeper understanding of characters’ motivations and the intricacies of their inner worlds.

Meaning of Stream of Consciousness

Definition of stream of consciousness.

It often eschews traditional punctuation and structure to capture the fluidity and subjectivity of human consciousness. This technique provides readers with an intimate and immersive insight into a character’s inner thoughts and experiences, emphasizing the complexity and uniqueness of individual mental landscapes.

Common Features of and Stream of Consciousness

Interior Monologue : Characters’ inner thoughts and mental processes are depicted in a continuous, unbroken flow, often mirroring the way thoughts naturally occur in the mind.
Real-Time Rendering : The narrative seeks to capture thoughts as they happen, providing readers with an immediate and immersive experience of the character’s consciousness.
Subjectivity : The narrative highlights the highly subjective nature of human perception, emphasizing that each character’s thoughts and experiences are unique and influenced by personal history and emotions.
Fragmentation : Traditional punctuation and linear structure are frequently disregarded, leading to fragmented and nonlinear storytelling that reflects the chaotic and interconnected nature of thought.
Multiple Perspectives : Different characters’ streams of consciousness may be presented within the same work, allowing readers to explore the inner worlds of various characters.
Psychological Depth : Authors use this technique to delve deeply into characters’ psyches, often revealing their motivations, fears, desires, and subconscious associations.
Temporal Fluidity : Time can be fluid in stream of consciousness narratives, with past, present, and future thoughts intermingling to reflect the non-linear nature of memory and perception.
Immediate Sensations : The style can capture immediate sensory experiences, including sensory perceptions such as sights, sounds, smells, and tactile sensations.
Introspection : Characters engage in introspection and self-reflection, providing insight into their self-awareness and inner conflicts.
Complexity and Ambiguity : The narrative style may add layers of complexity and ambiguity, encouraging readers to engage actively with the text and interpret the meaning behind fragmented thoughts.
Modernist Literary Movement : Stream of consciousness is closely associated with the modernist literary movement of the early 20th century, challenging conventional narrative structures and exploring the complexities of human consciousness.

Types of Stream of Consciousness

Common examples of stream of consciousness.

Daydreaming : When you let your mind wander without a specific focus, you may experience a stream of consciousness. Your thoughts may flow from one idea to another, often without a clear structure or goal.
Mindful Meditation : During mindfulness or meditation practices, you may observe your thoughts as they arise without actively trying to control or direct them. This can lead to a stream of consciousness where thoughts come and go naturally.
Conversations : In everyday conversations, people often express their thoughts and feelings as they occur in real-time. When engaged in a spontaneous and unscripted conversation, you may notice a continuous flow of thoughts and responses.
Journaling : When you write in a journal, especially in a freeform and unstructured way, you may find that your thoughts flow onto the page without much premeditation. This can result in a stream-of-consciousness writing style.
Problem Solving : When you’re trying to solve a complex problem or make a decision, your thoughts may flow from one consideration to another, exploring various possibilities and weighing pros and cons.
Creativity and Artistic Expression : Artists, writers, and musicians often tap into stream of consciousness to generate ideas and inspiration. They may let their thoughts flow freely, allowing unexpected connections to emerge.
Reflection and Self-Analysis : During moments of self-reflection or self-analysis, you may experience a stream of consciousness as you examine your emotions, past experiences, and future aspirations.
Dreams : While dreaming, your mind often follows a stream of consciousness, creating scenarios and narratives that can be vivid and unpredictable.
Reading and Watching : When you read a book or watch a movie, you may find yourself mentally reacting to the content in real-time, forming opinions, making predictions, and experiencing emotional responses as the story unfolds.
Driving or Commuting : During solitary activities like driving or commuting, your mind may wander, leading to a stream of consciousness where you reflect on various aspects of your life or engage in creative thinking.

Onomatopoeia: A Literary Device

Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › British Literature › Stream of Consciousness

Stream of Consciousness

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on October 7, 2022

The coining of this term has generally been credited to the American psychologist William James, older brother of novelist Henry James. It was originally used by psychologists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to describe the personal awareness of one’s mental processes. In a chapter of The Principles of Psychology titled “The Stream of Thought,” James provides a phenomenological description of this sensing of consciousness:

Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as “chain” or “train” do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows. A “river” or a “stream” are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life. (239; italics in the original).

It is helpful at the outset to distinguish stream of consciousness from free association. Stream of consciousness, from a psychological perspective, describes metaphorically the phenomena—that continuous and contiguous fl ow of sensations, impressions, images, memories, and thoughts—experienced by each person, at all levels of consciousness, that are generally associated with each person’s subjectivity, or sense of self. Free association, in contrast, is a process in which apparently random data collected from a subject allow connections to be made from the unconscious, subconscious, and preconscious to the conscious mind of that subject. Translated and mapped to the space of narrative literatures, free association can be one element in the means used to signify the stream of consciousness.

William James / Wikimedia

As a literary term, stream of consciousness appears in the early 20th century at the intersection of three apparently disparate projects: the developing science of psychology (e.g., investigations of the forms and manifestations of consciousness, as elaborated by Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, James, and others), the continuing speculations of Western philosophy as to the nature of being (e.g., investigations of consciousness in time by Henri Bergson), and reactionary forces in the arts that were turning away from realism in the late 19th century in favor of exploring a personal, self-conscious subjectivity. The psychological term was appropriated to describe a particular style of novel or technique of characterization that was prevalent in some fictional works, which relied on the mimetic representation of the mind of a character and which dramatized the full range of the character’s consciousness by direct and apparently unmediated quotation of such mental processes as memories, thoughts, impressions, and sensations. Stream of consciousness, constituting as it did the ground of self-awareness, was consequently extended to describe narratives and narrative strategies in which the overt presence of the author/narrator was suppressed in favor of presenting the story exclusively through the thought of one or more of the characters in the story. Examples of stream of consciousness techniques can arguably be found in narratives written during the last several centuries, including works by Rhoda Broughton and Lucy Clifford in the 19th century. Generally speaking, however, the British writers who are most often cited as exemplars of the stream of consciousness technique are associated with the high modern period of the early 20th century: Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, May Sinclair, and Dorothy Richardson.

Bearing in mind the origin of the term, it is easy to see why some Anglo-American literary critics and theorists have subsumed all textual manifestations of the mental activity of characters in a narrative under the overarching term stream of consciousness. While convenient, this tendency belies the rich range and depth of narrative methods for representing a character’s consciousness, often best described by the terms originally naming them. Consider, for example, the interior monologue, in which, a running monologue—similar to those we all experience inside our own minds but that we cannot experience in the minds of others except in fictional narrative—is textually rendered as the unmediated but articulated, logical thoughts of a fictional character. That this monologue is unmediated, presented to the reader without either authorial or narratorial intervention or the common textual signs associated with narrative speech (e.g., quotation marks or attributive verbs), is crucial to establishing in the reader the sense of access to the consciousness of the character. That it is logical and respects grammatical form and syntax, as opposed to appearing as a random collection of disconnected thoughts and images, distinguishes it from another textual rendering of the stream of consciousness, that of sensory impression.

Sensory impression, as a mode of representing the stream of consciousness, occurs as simple lists of a character’s sensations or impressions, sometimes with ellipses separating them. These unconscious or preconscious sensory impressions represent the inarticulable thoughts, the imaginings of a character that are not experienced as words. To prevent the free associations that stem from such sensory impressions from running away with and destroying the flow and integrity of the narrative, a story must somehow be anchored within the stream of consciousness. One method is a recurring motif or theme. The motif appears on the surface of a character’s thoughts and then disappears among the flow of memories, sensations, and impressions it initiates only to resurface some time later, perhaps in a different form, to pull the story back up into the consciousness of both the character and the reader. Consider the example of Virginia Woolf’s short story “The Mark on the Wall.” The story begins as a meditation, which could easily be read as a spoken monologue, on a series of recollected events but quickly turns, through the motif of a mark seen by the narrator over a mantlepiece on the wall, to a nearly random stream of loosely connected memories and impressions. As the story progresses, the mark and speculations as to its nature and origin appear and disappear as a thread running in and out, binding the loose folds of the narrator’s recollections to one another. The narrator’s stream of consciousness ranges widely over time and space, whereas the narrator quite clearly remains bound to a particular place and time, anchored—seemingly—by the mark on the wall.

While not generally considered a textual manifestation of stream of consciousness in the conventional sense—in part because it is associated with third-person rather than first-person narration—another method of representing the consciousness of characters is free indirect discourse, or reported or experienced speech. Consider the following, from the ending paragraphs of Joyce’s short story “The Dead”:

He wondered at his riot of emotions an hour before. From what had it proceeded? From his aunt’s supper, from his own foolish speech, from the wine and dancing, the merry-making when saying good-night in the hall, the pleasure of the walk along the river in the snow. Poor Aunt Julia! She, too, would soon be a shade with the shade of Patrick Morkan and his horse. (222)

The first sentence is clearly the narrator telling what the character, Gabriel, is thinking; but with the second sentence comes a transition in the form of a series of sensory impressions that moves the reader to Gabriel’s own conscious thoughts. In the end, it is not the narrator who thinks, “Poor Aunt Julia!”

BIBLIOGRAPHY Cohn, Dorrit. Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978. Bowling, Lawrence Edward. “What Is the Stream of Consciousness Technique?” PMLA 65, no. 4 (1950): 333–345. James, William. The Principles of Psychology. 1890. New York: Dover Publications, 1950. Joyce, James. Dubliners. 1916. New York: The Viking Press, 1967. Woolf, Virginia. The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf. 2nd ed. New York: Harcourt, 1989.

To the Lighthouse

Virginia woolf, ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

Woolf employs a stream-of-consciousness style of narration throughout To the Lighthouse as a crucial tool to manipulate the pacing of her narrative and slow it down to the speed of her characters' thoughts. Consider how Woolf follows Mrs. Ramsay's mind in the following passage, from Chapter 1 of "The Window":

If she finished it to-night, if they did go to the Lighthouse after all, it was to be given to the Lighthouse keeper for his little boy, who was threatened with a tuberculous hip; together with a pile of old magazines, and some tobacco, indeed whatever she could find lying about, not really wanted, but only littering the room, to give those poor fellows who must be bored to death sitting all day with nothing to do but polish the lamp and trim the wick... Cite this Quote

Because stream-of-consciousness narration follows a realistic articulation of thoughts as they wander from subject to subject, the reader reads the characters' thoughts at the very rate at which they occur in the characters' minds, as observed by Woolf's omniscient narrator. By setting the pace of the novel with this stream-of-consciousness technique, Woolf is able to give the reader a glimpse into the Ramsays' world in its full complexity: by the time "The Window" section draws to a close, after a 150 pages, only a day has passed. Through this view of the world in To the Lighthouse , Woolf is able to give the reader a high-resolution account of the characters' interior lives as they experience life, death, and—whether they like it or not—the passage of time.

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9 Stream of Consciousness

Dora Zhang is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at University of California, Berkeley. She is author of Strange Likeness: Description and the Modernist Novel (2020).

Published: 11 August 2021
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Few terms are more associated with the innovations of modernist fiction—and Virginia Woolf’s novels in particular—than ‘stream of consciousness’, yet the contours of the term often remain vague. This chapter argues that Woolf makes distinctive contributions to the genre that have been underrecognized both because of its gendered association with formlessness, and because stream of consciousness is often simply conflated with interior monologue, which she mostly did not use. Instead, Woolf’s contributions include her use of free indirect discourse to overcome the egotism of the first person, experiments with rendering collective streams of consciousness in Between the Acts , and finally, her use of analogies to evoke the feeling of thinking, which also illuminates unappreciated links to William James, the psychologist who coined the term together, Woolf’s strategies refute the charge of intense individualism that is often levied at stream-of-consciousness writing.

Few terms are as associated with the formal innovations of the modernist novel as stream of consciousness , a mode of writing that records the flickering parade of impressions across a character’s mind from a subjective point of view. Pioneered in the English tradition by Dorothy Richardson and James Joyce, Virginia Woolf is acknowledged to be one of its most skilled practitioners. But despite the ubiquitous familiarity of the term in general, and its association with Woolf in particular, her innovations in this arena have not been clearly recognized. This stems first of all from a confusion over whether the term refers to a particular stylistic technique, or whether it refers to something like a genre, constituted by shared themes. 1 ‘Stream of consciousness’ is often used interchangeably with one particular technique: interior monologue. However, this conflation is misleading, and I will use the term to refer to a genre that employs many aesthetic strategies, among which interior monologue is just one. 2 By expanding its definition, we are better equipped to appreciate the range of techniques that make up stream-of-consciousness texts, and Woolf’s contributions in particular. For while it is famously associated with irregular or absent punctuation, fragmented or incomplete sentences, ellipses, and discontinuous syntax, as in Molly Bloom’s soliloquy at the end of Ulysses , Woolf’s innovations in stream of consciousness writing announce themselves more quietly. Moreover, a gendered association of the genre with the personal, the private, the small, and the detail has led writing by women to be more often considered ‘formless’, obscuring the precise nature of their formal contributions.

Woolf’s contributions to stream of consciousness include at least three features, which form my focus here. First, I will look at her virtuosic use of free indirect discourse, which enables her to shift perspectives with unparalleled fluidity, and which in turn allows her to overcome what she herself felt was the great drawback of the novel of subjective experience: the egotism of the first person. Second, I examine Woolf’s experiments with evoking a collective stream of consciousness in her late novel Between the Acts . While there are dangers to collective thinking, as Woolf, a vocal critic of fascism, was well aware, she was also drawn to moments of shared perception as a way of overcoming individual isolation. Third, I make the case that her use of analogies, something not ordinarily associated with stream of consciousness, constitutes an important technique of this genre. These analogies, which are directed above all at conveying the feeling of being conscious, also illuminate unappreciated links between Woolf and William James, the psychologist who popularized the term. Taken together, Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness strategies refute a major critique of this genre: its intense individualism and liability to lapse into solipsism.

Early Tributaries

But first, let us return to the head of the stream. The term is usually credited to William James, specifically the famous ‘Stream of Thought’ chapter of his 1890 Principles of Psychology . 3 Insisting on the continuous rather than successive nature of thought, James writes:

Consciousness … does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as ‘chain’ or ‘train’ do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows. A ‘river’ or a ‘stream’ are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life. 4

Literary commentators have rarely paid close attention to the meaning of this term and its significance in James, and I will return to his affiliations with Woolf towards the end of the chapter. Suffice it for now to note that James was deploying the metaphor in order to refute Associationism, the prevailing theory of mind at the time in which substantive thoughts occurred in consciousness discretely and discontinuously. For James, the problem with Associationism was that it tended to both emphasize and atomize the terms being associated (i.e. ideas) at the expense of the actual association (i.e. the relations) between them. As we will see, it was precisely these relations that Woolf, too, sought to capture.

The literary usage of ‘stream of consciousness’ was first introduced by May Sinclair in a 1918 review of Dorothy Richardson’s novels in The Egoist . ‘Nothing happens’, Sinclair wrote, ‘It is just life going on and on. It is Miriam Henderson’s stream of consciousness going on and on.’ 5 From the first, this mode was understood as an attempt to obtain direct contact with its object—called variously consciousness, experience, reality, or life—without mediation or intervention, and freed from the falsification of plot and story. Joyce and Richardson were cited as pioneers of the method, but Woolf ’s name was rarely absent from any discussion, usually evoked as one of its most prominent practitioners. So in a 1926 article in The Atlantic defending stream-of-consciousness fiction from those who called it ‘an eccentric fad’, Ethel Wallace Hawkins wrote, ‘the evolution—or, more accurately, the gradual intensification—of this method may best be traced in the three novels of Virginia Woolf— The Voyage Out , Jacob’s Room , and Mrs Dalloway . 6 By the end of the 1920s, after the publication of Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse , as well as nine volumes of Richardson’s Pilgrimage sequence, Ulysses , and The Sound and the Fury , stream of consciousness had become the hallmark of the modern novelist. 7 Joseph Warren Beach and Percy Lubbock both used the term in their influential treatises on the craft of fiction, and by 1927, the phrase was familiar enough that the American writer and critic Katherine Fullerton Gerould could write in The Saturday Review , ‘I do not know whence the phrase came, nor does it matter, since it has become familiar to us all within the last decade.’ 8

Genre and Gender

While stream of consciousness quickly spread across the literary landscape in the early twentieth century, it was not universally praised. Common criticisms charged it with tedium, self-absorption, and triviality. Lamenting the absence of drama and action in the style, Gerould concluded, ‘the dullness of books like “Dark Laughter” and “Mrs Dalloway” almost makes the comic strips seem amusing’; and D.H. Lawrence famously remarked caustically, ‘ “Did I feel a twinge in my little toe or didn’t I”, asks every character of Mr Joyce, Miss Richardson or M. Proust.’ 9 Although these criticisms extended to male as well as female writers, it is important to note that stream of consciousness was, from the first, discussed in gendered terms. The idea that the genre was formless, that it was concerned only with trivialities, and that it was self-involved were all cast in terms of gendered binaries: soft versus hard, small versus big, internal versus external, and individual versus social. It also fell on one side of a gendered divide within the tropology of modernist poetics: the very metaphor of the stream, with its associations of vague, misty, amorphous flow, contrasts with the valorizations of the hard, rigid, precise, and granite in the poetics of Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and T.E. Hulme, among others. 10 The charges of formlessness, or absent or failed design, were also levelled much more at female writers like Woolf, Richardson, and Katherine Mansfield. In contrast, a male stream-of-consciousness writer like Joyce was more often credited with being guided by intellect rather than ‘intuition’ or ‘impression’, and what might be called the absence of form in one context became innovative and revolutionary in another. 11 Stream-of-consciousness writing was and, in many ways, remains associated with the delicate, the miniature, the precious, and disorganized detail over the cohesive pattern—all decidedly feminized traits. 12

At the same time, the supposedly feminine nature of this style was sometimes a rallying cry for its practitioners. In a 1938 foreword to Pilgrimage Richardson characterized her project as forging a new literary form in an attempt ‘to produce a feminine equivalent of the current masculine realism’. 13 Feminine prose, she wrote, ‘should properly be unpunctuated, moving from point to point without formal obstructions’. 14 In reviewing volumes of Pilgrimage , Woolf too aligned Richardson’s linguistic innovation with her womanhood. ‘She has invented … a sentence which we might call the psychological sentence of the feminine gender. It is of a more elastic fibre than the old, capable of stretching to the extreme, of suspending the frailest particles, of enveloping the vaguest shapes’ ( E 3 367). We cannot fail to be reminded here of Woolf’s own formulation of the aim of the novel in manifestos such as ‘Modern Fiction’. While conceding that Richardson is working on ‘an infinitely smaller scale’, Woolf does not hesitate to rank her achievement with that of Chaucer, Donne, and Dickens, each of whom has also shown that the heart ‘is a body which moves perpetually, and is thus always standing in a new relation to the emotions which are its sun’ ( E 3 367).

In alluding to the smallness of the scale on which Richardson is working, Woolf is highlighting a criticism that she herself often encountered. The charge of triviality levelled at stream-of-consciousness texts depends on assumptions about whose interiority is worthy of representation, and whose experience can stand for broader conditions or reach out toward larger social, historical threads, instead of remaining confined to the personal. Woolf herself resisted the usual hierarchies of size and value, insisting, ‘let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small’ ( E 4 161). We may certainly take her to task for not expanding the purview of her own representations of consciousness beyond a relatively narrow segment of the upper middle class, but this does not thereby negate the importance of her assertion that ‘everything is the proper stuff of fiction’ ( E 4 164). 15

Woolf’s point can also be read in light of a Marxist critique of stream of consciousness within a wider critique of modernism as representative of a bourgeois individualism. 16 In this view, where modernist works are said to retreat into fragmented, private, subjective perspectives and abandon any attempt to represent an objective social totality, stream of consciousness would appear to be the very embodiment of an alienated, reified form. But whatever the merits of such a critique as a demystification of modernist ideology, we should also not overlook the gendered assumptions it contains. In many ways it extends an old association of the feminine with interiority and the private and domestic spheres, in contrast to the outward-looking masculine domains of political and economic history. But of course, the doctrine of the separate spheres is something that feminist critics have long refuted, not least Woolf herself. In ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, she grounds her critique of the Edwardians in the fact that while the nature of social relationships has changed, the forms of the novel have not kept up. ‘When human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics, and literature’ ( E 3 422). As Nancy Armstrong observes, for Woolf, history does not take place in the world outside the house: ‘Rather, history makes its mark on human experience in such small personal ways as when “Mrs Brown took out her little white handkerchief and began to dab her eyes.” Here, at the centers of little networks of human relations, occur those changes that will eventually show in “religion, conduct, politics, and literature.” ’ 17 The idea that stream of consciousness is simply expressive of a bourgeois individualist ideology has caused it to be regarded with a certain embarrassment among leftist critics. But I argue here that Woolf’s contributions to the genre—by experimenting with collective streams, and by attempting to capture the nuances of ‘networks of human relations’ within the form of the novel—allow us to re-evaluate the association of stream of consciousness with solipsistic interiority.

Interior Monologue and Free Indirect Discourse

We have seen some criticisms of stream of consciousness, but even sympathizers noted the formal challenges posed by the attempt to represent consciousness in a new way. These challenges centred especially on the limitations of interior monologue and its first-person perspective. In a 1921 interview entitled ‘The Future of the Novel’, May Sinclair observes that while stream of consciousness was the developmental endpoint of the psychological novel, it is really only suited to novels that centre on a single character and a single point of view. ‘It certainly remains to be seen whether it will be successful in dealing with groups of characters all equally important.’ 18 Moreover, by inhabiting characters’ perspectives so thoroughly, readers are prevented from knowing more than the characters do. According to Sinclair, the challenge for authors, then, is to ‘present things so that they appear both as they really are and as they appear to the consciousness of his one subject’. 19

These reservations were shared by Woolf herself. In her diaries she criticized the ‘egotistic’ tendency in Joyce ( D 2 189), writing a little later, ‘if one lets the mind run loose it becomes egotistic; personal, which I detest’ ( D 2 321). While this passage has sometimes been read as evidence of Woolf’s competitive anxieties about her achievements in light of Joyce’s, we should take it seriously as an expression of her aesthetic priorities, whatever its merits (or lack thereof) as an assessment of Joyce’s work. For Woolf, the problem of egotism is exemplified by the dominance of a single perspective, as in interior monologue. These limitations are especially clear in the novel that Joyce credited with inaugurating the method of interior monologue, Édouard Dujardin’s Les lauriers sont coupés (1888). In this passage, the narrator, Daniel Prince, is preparing to leave a restaurant. ‘I get up; I put my coat back on; the waiter’s pretending to help me; thank you; my hat; my gloves; here in my pocket; I’m going … a waiter opens the door for me; good night; it’s cold; let’s button up my coat.’ 20 The exposition in the first person here is not only awkward but also creates a sense of claustrophobia when sustained over the course of the novel. We never get access to the thoughts of any other character, including Léa, the actress who is the object of Daniel’s affection.

Joyce circumvents the limitations of the single perspective in Ulysses by gathering a chorus of voices, and by eliminating the narration of exposition he mitigates the clumsiness of Dujardin. But to do so Joyce has to mix interior monologue with other narrative modes, including free indirect discourse, supplementing the first person with the third. And while different points of view are represented in Ulysses , as in other prominent stream of consciousness works such as Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury , narrative perspective is organized by chapter and remains discretely divided. That is, the gathering of multiple voices remains separated, with transitions from one perspective to another clearly marked. Woolf’s innovation lies in the fluidity, subtlety, and frequency with which she shifts between points of view without imposing boundaries between them. Moreover, by playing perspectives against one another, her use of the ‘dual voice’ of free indirect discourse also answers Sinclair’s second challenge to stream of consciousness, enabling her to present things both as they are and as they appear to a perceiving subject. 21

To be sure, Woolf is by no means the first writer to employ free indirect discourse, which has been used in the English novel since at least Jane Austen. Gustave Flaubert brought it to prominence in the European novel in the mid-nineteenth century, and by the modernist period this technique was ubiquitous. Free indirect discourse is a particularly novelistic grammatical form that combines elements of both direct and indirect speech, eliminating the first-person pronoun and replacing it with a third-person ‘he’ or ‘she’ rendered subjective. Suppressing the quotation marks that are characteristic of direct speech, it nevertheless represents the thoughts, speech, and perceptions of a character directly, without the intervention of a narrator who reports or comments on them. 22 When early on in Mrs Dalloway we read, ‘But how strange, on entering the Park, the silence; the mist; the hum … and who should be coming along with his back against the Government buildings, most appropriately, carrying a dispatch box stamped with the Royal Arms, who but Hugh Whitbread; her old friend Hugh—the admirable Hugh!’ ( MD 5) we understand that even though this passage is written in the third person, we’re witnessing Clarissa thinking these thoughts, rather than receiving a report of her thoughts from a narrator. Instead of being told what a character is perceiving, saying, or thinking, free indirect discourse grants direct access to a character’s mind. In her diaries Woolf acknowledges her preference for ‘oratio obliqua’ ( D 3 106), as she called it, contrasting it with her ‘few direct sentences’, and indeed most of her mature fiction is written in this style, with the notable exception of The Waves .

In addition to allowing us to inhabit a character’s perspective with great intimacy, free indirect discourse also enables the narrative to move easily between different minds, all looking out onto the same external world. Sometimes, the shift occurs within a single sentence, as in this example from the climactic dinner scene in the first section of To the Lighthouse : ‘What damned rot they talk, thought Charles Tansley, laying down his spoon precisely in the middle of his plate, which he had swept clean, as if, Lily thought (he sat opposite to her with his back to the window precisely in the middle of view), he were determined to make sure of his meals’ ( TL 115). In one economical sentence Woolf reveals a number of things: Charles Tansley’s resentment (born of shame about his poverty coupled with his sense of intellectual superiority), Lily Briscoe’s perceptiveness, underscoring her role as the novel’s chief observer, and her dislike of Tansley (spurred by his misogyny), which is tinged here with a certain class prejudice of her own—she sees him as determined to make sure of his meals because she finds him smug and self-serving, but there’s also an implicit sneer at his eagerness for food. In this passage the pivot in the perspective shift is the spoon, which Charles Tansley lays down in the middle of his plate—and the sentence—as if for Lily to pick up as we move into her point of view. This move is typical of Woolf, who tends to use a publicly observable fact, in this case the plate and the spoon, as a hinge to shift between different characters’ perspectives and their private thoughts. In scenes such as these, free indirect discourse allows for layered and refracted descriptions that tell us something about both the observer and the observed, revealing not only insights of individual psychology but also of social analysis.

Woolf is especially interested in the epistemological affordances of the play of perspectives that opens up once narration is liberated from the tyranny of the first person. Her novelistic universe is woven through piecing together fragments—sometimes very brief, sometimes quite extended—from a tapestry of perspectives. 23 Accordingly, Woolf’s use of free indirect discourse is especially effective in scenes that bring together a variety of people, whether during a family dinner, on a busy London street, or at a glittering party, as we see in this passage below from Mrs Dalloway involving Ellie Henderson, Clarissa’s poorer, shabbier cousin, and Richard Dalloway.

‘Well, Ellie, and how’s the world treating you ?’ [Richard Dalloway] said in his genial way, and Ellie Henderson, getting nervous and flushing and feeling that it was extraordinarily nice of him to come and talk to her, said that many people really felt the heat more than the cold. ‘Yes they do,’ said Richard Dalloway. ‘Yes.’ But what more did one say? ‘Hullo, Richard,’ said somebody, taking him by the elbow, and, good Lord, there was old Peter, old Peter Walsh. He was delighted to see him—ever so pleased to see him! … And off they went together walking right across the room, giving each other little pats, as if they hadn’t met for a long time, Ellie Henderson thought, watching them go, certainly she knew that man’s face. A tall man, middle aged, rather fine eyes, dark, wearing spectacles, with a look of John Burrows. ( MD 169–70)

In the space of a few lines, we see the interaction from both Ellie and Richard’s perspectives—his sense of obligation to talk to her, her nervousness in front of her grander relatives—in what is roughly the literary equivalent of a split screen with subtitles of thoughts. Note that the perspective in the line ‘But what more did one say?’ is ambiguous; it could belong to either Ellie or Richard, or in fact both, briefly uniting them in a moment of shared social unease. When the pause is broken by the appearance of Peter Walsh, Ellie’s observation of him gives us the only external description of Peter that we get in the book. Coming so close to the end, it is defamiliarizing to see a character whom we have known so intimately be described as ‘a tall man, middle aged … dark, wearing spectacles’, but it shows us a view of him that accords with the knowledge of the describer, in this case Ellie, situating both perceiver and perceived within layered psychological and sociological matrices.

‘One wanted fifty pairs of eyes to see with’, Lily Briscoe thinks in To the Lighthouse , ‘Fifty pairs of eyes were not enough to get round that one woman [Mrs Ramsay] with’ ( TL 198). With free indirect discourse, Woolf finds the linguistic resources to represent the perspectives of fifty pairs of eyes, as well as some eyeless ones representing ‘the world seen without a self’ ( W 287). The world is pieced together from what is seen through these individual points of view, and through them the reader is granted from moment to moment the intimate knowledge of another that Lily Briscoe seeks. One of Woolf’s great themes is the limits of what we can know of other people, and the gap between the public and the private self is at once a philosophical problem stemming from the fact that we never have access to other people’s minds, and also a social problem about how we fashion ourselves according to certain conventions, as well as how we read each other according to such predetermined categories. She thus uses free indirect discourse to enact on the level of form something her novels are preoccupied with on the level of theme. For Sinclair, the challenge of the stream-of-consciousness writer was to ‘present things so that they appear both as they really are and as they appear to the consciousness of his one subject’. Woolf does not posit any simple objective/subjective divide between things as they are and things as they appear, but by stitching together multiple perspectives with unprecedented fluidity, she creates a common reality while allowing her readers glimpses of how this reality is differently experienced by different subjects.

‘I rejected, we substituted’: Collective Streams

Even as it remains true that, for Woolf, the supreme mystery remains, ‘here was one room, there another’ ( MD 127), in her works the acute awareness of the breach between two minds is balanced by brief moments of communal feeling. Stream-of-consciousness writing is usually taken to be concerned exclusively with individual minds; an idea exacerbated by its conflation with interior monologue. But in the late fiction, we see Woolf’s experiments with free indirect discourse take on yet another, less recognized dimension: the rendering of collective consciousness. The best-known novel that experiments with a group is, of course, The Waves , which is sometimes described as six voices raised in a single soliloquy. But the characters of Bernard, Susan, Neville, Rhoda, Ginny, and Louis retain distinct perceptions, even as they also seem to have an uncanny access to each other’s thoughts. I will return to The Waves momentarily in order to consider the dangers of communal feeling, but first, I want to look at several moments in a lesser-known novel, Between the Acts (1941), when a group of characters seem to be thinking and perceiving as one. The idea that stream-of-consciousness writing is solely individualistic has obscured Woolf’s interest in rendering collective streams, while the failure to recognize her experiments in this regard has exacerbated a narrow view of the genre.

Woolf’s interest in group consciousness was not isolated among her contemporaries. There was a flurry of interest in ideas of ‘group mind’, crowd theory, and group psychology in the early decades of the twentieth century, especially after the outbreak of World War I, and again in the 1930s as the prospect of World War II loomed. As Allen McLaurin has documented, Woolf and her Bloomsbury associates were aware of and fascinated by these developments. 24 In 1913 Woolf reviewed a novel by the French writer Jules Romains, leader of the Unanimism movement, which propounded the doctrine of a communal psychic life among groups, and McLaurin proposes that Romains had an unacknowledged influence on Woolf. 25 Fascinating as this intellectual history is, what I am concerned with here are the ways in which shared perceptions find formal expression in free indirect discourse.

It should not be surprising that we find it in Between the Acts , a novel that takes community—that of a family, a village, and a nation—as its theme. The story is set in a bucolic English village, where Miss La Trobe, a misfit outcast, directs the annual village pageant, which tells of the history of the England. In the novel, which begins and ends with the Olivers, a family of landed gentry, there are several noteworthy interludes of anonymous, collective speech among the villagers who form the audience for the pageant. ‘… Dressing up. That’s the great thing, dressing up. And it’s pleasant now, the sun’s not so hot … That’s one good the war brought us—longer days … Where did we leave off? D’you remember? The Elizabethans … Perhaps she’ll reach the present, if she skips … D’you think people change? Their clothes, of course … But I mean ourselves …’ ( BA 121, original ellipses). These overheard snatches of conversation are so many elliptical ‘scraps, orts, and fragments’ ( BA 188); they form momentary lines of continuity and response, but the voices remain distinct, even if anonymously grouped together.

Subtler and more merged are the moments when characters seem to perceive together as one, as in this early scene when a group of young people are preparing the barn for the pageant:

Young men and women—Jim, Iris, David, Jessica—were even now busy with garlands of red and white paper roses left over from the Coronation. The seeds and the dust from the sacks made them sneeze. Iris had a handkerchief bound round her forehead; Jessica wore breeches. The young men worked in shirt sleeves … ‘Old flimsy’ (Mrs Swithin’s nickname) had been nailing another placard on the Barn … The workers were laughing too, as if old Swithin had left a wake of laughter behind her. The old girl with a wisp of white hair flying, knobbed shoes as if she had claws corned like a canary’s, and black stockings wrinkled over the ankles, naturally made David cock his eye and Jessica wink back, as she handed him a length of paper roses … So they laughed; but respected. If she wore pearls, pearls they were. ( BA 26–7).

The present tense indexicals and past tense, ‘were even now’, along with colloquial language like ‘the old girl’, alert us to the fact that this is free indirect discourse. But whose point of view is being represented? Jim, Iris, David, and Jessica, reminiscent of the sextet of The Waves , are minor characters who are only briefly mentioned here. The affectionately teasing perception of Mrs Swithin, ‘the old girl with a wisp of white hair flying, knobbed shoes as if she had claws corned like a canary’s, and black stockings wrinkled over the ankles’, seems to be a shared one, or at the very least shared between David and Jessica, who are explicitly named in the sentence. Whereas in Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse free indirect discourse is used primarily to highlight the differences in people’s perceptions, both of each other and themselves, here it is used to render the easy camaraderie between this high-spirited gang. This is notably a very ordinary kind of intimacy—an everyday experience of shared perception and understanding that stands in contrast to the more visionary moments of communion in The Waves . This passage holds no great significance for the story of Between the Acts , but we see in this almost throwaway moment the possibility of a collective stream of consciousness reflecting ordinary moments of shared feeling and perceiving, which stand in counterbalance to the emphasis on isolation and dispersion elsewhere in the novel.

Of course, group feeling has its dangers, as Woolf was well aware. The Unanimists were optimistic about the possibility of a communal spirit animating a group, portraying it in ecstatic terms. But Woolf was also aware of works that painted a more pessimistic view, such as Wilfred Trotter’s Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War (1916), which she discussed with Leonard and with Roger Fry. 26 Trotter’s book, influenced by the work of the crowd psychologist, Gustave Le Bon, emphasized the irrationality of the masses and their susceptibility to influence and control. Woolf was pulled in two directions: at once drawn to the idea of communal feeling and perceiving as a way of bridging the divide between individual minds, and also wary of the violence that can result from the manipulation of the ‘herd instinct’. 27 We find evidence of this tension throughout her works, especially in The Waves , the novel concerned most overtly with group consciousness. In an influential essay, Jane Marcus reads the ending of the novel, with Bernard telling the story of the other characters’ lives, as a cautionary tale of a fascist and imperialist instinct, the domination of a single voice over a heteroglossic chorus. 28 And Jessica Berman has persuasively argued that The Waves is intricately bound up with the fantasies of community offered by the proto-fascist movement gathering in Britain in the early 1930s, whose power Woolf recognizes even as she also sees and critiques its limitations. 29 For my purposes here, it is significant that what is at stake in the conclusion of The Waves is not so much a group mind or a communal feeling so much as Bernard’s own feeling of being indistinct from his friends, manifest in his narration of their stories. Unlike The Waves , which cedes the last word to Bernard, in Between the Acts , the pendulum remains swinging between individual isolation and a sense of community, summed up in the repeated refrain of the gramophone, ‘dispersed are we; who have come together’ but also ‘let us retain whatever made that harmony’ ( BA 95). It is crucial that the moments of collective consciousness like the group perception of Mrs Swithin and the anonymous fragmented speech of the villagers concerns brief, intermittent flashes of fellow-feeling rather than the sustained resolution of multiple voices into a single one, as at the end of The Waves . Such flashes are arguably less prone to devolving from fellow-feeling into groupthink, even if Woolf, especially in her writing of the 1930s, never forgot this danger.

Psycho-analogies and the Feeling of Relations

We have just seen Woolf’s experiments in rendering collective perception, and in the final part of this chapter I want to turn to a still lesser-known technique that I propose belongs to the stylistic repertoire of stream-of-consciousness writing: the use of analogies, often extended, to represent thought and feeling. These analogies, which Woolf uses with particular frequency and agility, bring her together with William James, and it will show us another way of understanding the deep concern with relationality that underlies her stream-of-consciousness writing.

Although Dorrit Cohn identified what she called ‘psycho-analogies’ as a narrative mode of representing consciousness in Transparent Minds (1978) , critics have not subsequently recognized the use of comparative strategies as a feature of stream of consciousness writing. 30 And yet psycho-analogies are prevalent in modernist works. Citing examples from Proust, Nathalie Sarraute, and Robert Musil (of whom one scholarly count found an astonishing 337 similes in thirty-eight pages), Cohn calls Woolf ‘the stream-of-consciousness novelist who employs psycho-analogies most copiously’. 31 These often extended similes distend narrative time and underscore the contradictory nature of thoughts and feelings while bypassing ‘not only self-articulation, but also self-understanding’, since they are not part of the character’s own inner discourse. 32 Although they can be attributed either to a narrator or ‘infused more directly into the thought-stream of the character’, psycho-analogies are not accounts of what a character is thinking, and so serve a different purpose than the narration of inner speech that comprises interior monologue. 33 Their primary aim, we could say, is not so much to convey the content of a character’s thoughts, but rather the process of thinking. More precisely, psycho-analogies are used to describe in highly specific and evocative ways the feeling of thinking.

Woolf is an extremely adept practitioner of such analogies. Take these examples, from Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse :

But—but—why did she suddenly feel, for no reason that she could discover, desperately unhappy? As a person who has dropped some grain of pearl or diamond into the grass and parts the tall blades very carefully, this way and that, and searches here and there vainly, and at last spies it there at the roots, so she went through one thing and another … ( MD 120–1) What then was this terror, this hatred? Turning back among the many leaves which the past had folded in him, peering into the heart of that forest where light and shade so chequer each other that all shape is distorted, and one blunders, now with the sun in one’s eyes, now with a dark shadow, he sought an image to cool and detach and round off his feeling in a concrete shape. ( TL 185) 34

In the first example, Clarissa Dalloway rummages in her mind for the cause of an emotion, and in the second, James Ramsay attempts to identify a feeling by combing through his past. Incidentally, James’s search for ‘an image to cool and detach and round off his feeling in a concrete shape’ is an apt description of Woolf’s own process. Both analogies concern states of confusion, a sense of not quite knowing and then seeking to discover what one is thinking or feeling by turning over various memories and ideas. The ensuing images in the analogies—of someone searching for a dropped pearl in the grass, and of a person blundering in a forest blinded by chequered rays of light—aim to give a sense of how this state of mind feels. It is also characteristic of Woolf that these comparisons are dynamic—in both cases, the analogous image is not a static tableau but involves some active process. More than what is thought, felt, or sensed, these descriptions are concerned with conveying what it is like to think, which, for Woolf, is never separate from feeling and sensing.

The deployment of psycho-analogies brings Woolf, a preeminent writer of stream of consciousness, close to William James, a pioneer of this term in psychology. Recall that for James, the stream metaphor was intended to reorient us toward relations and to see these as being no less important as the terms they connected. Rather than a train with discrete albeit connected cars, James argues that our mind is closer to a continuously flowing stream. Every substantive thought is ineluctably inflected by myriad relations to what has preceded it and what will follow. ‘Every definite image in the mind is steeped and dyed in the free water that flows round it. With it goes the sense of its relations, near and remote, the dying echo of whence it came to us, the dawning sense of whither it is to lead.’ 35 For James, this free water with its dying echoes and dawning senses is crucially constitutive of the way consciousness feels, which we neglect in our blinkered view of thoughts as ‘ “about” this object or “about” that, the stolid word about engulfing all their delicate idiosyncrasies in its monotonous sound’. 36 If a thunderclap breaks into silence, for instance, ‘the awareness of the previous silence creeps and continues; for what we hear when the thunder crashes is not thunder pure , but thunder-breaking-upon-silence-and-contrasting-with-it … The thunder itself we believe to abolish and exclude the silence; but the feeling of the thunder is also a feeling of the silence as just gone.’ 37

It is this deeply relational aspect of consciousness, hazy and impossible to isolate though these relations may be, that Woolf’s writing is also particularly interested in conveying. Thus, her works tend to be highly associative, darting back and forth across time and space as one impression recalls another. In our focus on the ‘aboutness’ of thoughts, James observes, we have been misled by our use of language. ‘We ought to say a feeling of and , a feeling of if , a feeling of but , and a feeling of by , quite as readily as we say a feeling of blue or a feeling of cold. Yet we do not: so inveterate has our habit become of recognizing the existence of the substantive parts alone, that language almost refuses to lend itself to any other use.’ 38 Gertrude Stein’s radical experiments with prepositions is one inheritance of this Jamesian insight in literature, but we can also see it importantly, if less directly, in the work of Woolf. Her psycho-analogies are keyed especially to the relations between substantive thoughts, not only conveying particular thoughts about particular things but also evoking the ways in which one thought or memory is ineluctably inflected by other experiences and associations. This is reflected in the very form of the analogy itself, in which the ‘like’ or ‘just as’ or ‘as if’ reaches toward other terms and experiences, weaving an intricate web of relations.

We find a beautiful image for the feeling of relating in Mrs Dalloway , just after Peter Walsh leaves Clarissa after their first reunion. As he walks down Victoria Street, Peter hears the bell of St Margaret’s toll and experiences ‘an extraordinarily clear, yet puzzling, recollection of her, as if this bell had come into the room years ago, where they sat at some moment of great intimacy, and had gone from one to the other and had left, like a bee with honey, laden with the moment’ ( MD 49–50). The feeling at issue here is an uncanny sense of déjà vu, but unlike the Proustian involuntary memory, which collapses past and present time, the distance travelled between the two moments is here delicately preserved in the flight of the bee. If William James reminds us that when we hear a crash of thunder it is not the thunder alone but ‘thunder-breaking-upon-silence-and-contrasting-with-it’, the flight of the bee is an analogy for all the variegated shades of relations that colour any experience.

Including such analogies in our account of stream of consciousness offers us a new view onto the genre. Of course, the juxtapositional energies of analogy can be put to any number of uses, including to shock, ironize, and play, all of which Woolf deploys at different moments. But one important use, evident in her analogies to describe the feeling of being conscious, is to highlight and to evoke the cognitive habit of relating itself. What Woolf conveys in these analogical descriptions of thinking, remembering, and searching through the mind is the feeling of ‘if’ and the feeling of ‘and’, the feeling of ‘like’ and the feeling of ‘as’. She highlights the propensity to make connections, and in this sense reading analogies solely for their content would be to take them only in their ‘aboutness’. What they equally illustrate in each case is the feeling of relationality itself.

Although Woolf, along with many of her modernist contemporaries, has often been accused of being overly preoccupied with individual minds, sometimes to the point of solipsism, we can in fact discern in the very textures of her stream of consciousness writing a deeply relational worldview that reaches out to other domains of experience, social, historical, and natural. ‘All human relations have shifted—those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children’ ( E 3 422). We can look to thematic representations in her novels for an account of these shifting relations—perhaps best depicted in The Years , which follows several generations of the Pargiter family—but we can also look to the level of form itself. In her deft use of free indirect discourse to braid a common reality out of different perspectives, in her experiments with rendering collective perception, and in her analogical descriptions of the feeling of consciousness, Woolf shows us in different ways the ineluctably relational nature of consciousness.

Selected Bibliography

Banfield, Ann , The Phantom Table: Woolf, Fry, Russell, and the Epistemology of Modernism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000 ), 307–11.

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Berman, Jessica , ‘Of Waves and Opposition: The Waves , Oswald Mosley, and the New Party’, in Merry M. Pawlowski , ed., Virginia Woolf and Fascism (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001 ), 105–21.

Cohn, Dorrit , Transparent Minds (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978 ).

Gerould, Katharine Fullerton, ‘ Stream of Consciousness ’, The Saturday Review , 22 October 1927, 233–5, 223.

Hawkins, Ethel , ‘ The Stream of Consciousness Novel ’, The Atlantic Monthly , September 1926, 356–60.

James, William , Principles of Psychology , 2 vols (New York: Dover Books, 1950 ).

Long, Hoyt and Richard Jean So , ‘ Turbulent Flow: A Computational Model of World Literature ’, Modern Language Quarterly 77, no. 3 ( 2016 ), 345–67.

Lukács, Georg , ‘The Ideology of Modernism’, in Realism in Our Time: Literature and the Class Struggle , trans. John and Necke Mander (New York: Harper & Row, 1971 ), 17–46.

Mahaffey, Vicki , ‘Streams Beyond Consciousness’, in Jean-Michel Rabaté , ed., A Handbook of Modernism Studies (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2013 ), 35–54.

Marcus, Jane , ‘Britannia Rules The Waves ’, in Karen Lawrence , ed., Decolonizing Tradition: New Views of Twentieth-Century ‘British’ Literary Canons (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992 ), 136–62.

McIntire, Gabrielle , ‘Heteroglossia, Monologism, and Fascism: Bernard Reads The Waves ’, Narrative 13, no. 1 ( 2005 ), 29–45.

McLaurin, Allen , ‘ Virginia Woolf and Unanimism ’, Journal of Modern Literature 9, no. 1 (1981–1982), 115–22.

Palmer, Alan , ‘Stream of Consciousness or Interior Monologue’, in David Herman , Manfred Jahn , and Marie-Laure Ryan , eds, Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory (London: Routledge, 2010 ), 570–1.

Pascal, Roy , The Dual Voice: Free Indirect Speech and Its Function in the Nineteenth Century European Novel (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1977 ).

Schwartz, Sanford , The Matrix of Modernism: Pound, Eliot and Twentieth Century Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985 ).

This confusion is noted in the entry title in at least one encyclopaedia. See Alan Palmer , ‘Stream of Consciousness or Interior Monologue’, in David Herman , Manfred Jahn , and Marie-Laure Ryan , eds, Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory (London: Routledge, 2010), 570–1 .

Robert Humphrey makes a similar point in Stream of Consciousness in the Modern Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954), 5 . For more recent discussions see Hoyt Long and Richard Jean So , ‘Turbulent Flow: A Computational Model of World Literature’, Modern Language Quarterly 77, no. 3 (2016), 345–67 ; Vicki Mahaffey , ‘Streams Beyond Consciousness’, in Jean-Michel Rabaté , ed., A Handbook of Modernist Studies (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2013), 35–54 .

James himself came to it by way of the now largely forgotten British philosopher, Shadworth Hodgson, who first used the term in Time and Space: A Metaphysical Essay (London: Longman Green, 1865).

William James , Principles of Psychology , 2 vols (New York: Dover Books, 1950), 1: 239 .

May Sinclair , ‘The Novels of Dorothy Richardson’, The Egoist 5, no. 4 (1918), 58 .

Ethel Hawkins , ‘The Stream of Consciousness Novel’, The Atlantic Monthly , September 1926, 356–60, esp. 358 .

The characteristic modern novelist, the influential critic J. Middleton Murry wrote, attempted ‘to record immediately the growth of a consciousness. Immediately, without any effort at mediation by means of an interposed plot or story.’ See Murry , Discoveries (London: W.W. Collins & Sons, 1924), 98 .

Katharine Fullerton Gerould , ‘Stream of Consciousness’, The Saturday Review , 22 October 1927, 233–5, 223 .

Gerould, ‘Stream of Consciousness’ , 234; D. H. Lawrence , Selected Literary Criticism , ed. Anthony Beal (New York: Viking Books, 1956), 114 .

On this hard/soft divide as one of the oppositions of modernism see Sanford Schwartz , The Matrix of Modernism: Pound, Eliot and Twentieth Century Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985) .

So where Robert Humphrey sees Richardson as having moments of brilliance but finally becoming ‘lost in the overflow—a formless, unending deluge of realistic details’ (9), he writes of Joyce: ‘What the ends of Ulysses finally are, I do not expect to determine,’ suggesting that the failing of incomprehension lies with the critic, not the author. See Jesse Matz , Literary Impressionism and Modernist Aesthetics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 83–4 for a discussion of the different critical treatments of male and female modernist writers.

On the gendered history of the devaluation of the detail, see Naomi Schor , Reading in Detail (New York: Routledge, 2007) .

Dorothy M. Richardson , ‘Foreword’, Pilgrimage , 4 vols (London: Virago, 1979), 1: 9–10. In her Atlantic article, Hawkins also singles out ‘three brilliant women writers’ (Richardson, Katherine Mansfield, and Woolf) as key practitioners of the method, ‘interesting for their individuality in likeness’ ( ‘Stream of Consciousness’, 356 ).

Richardson, ‘Foreword’ , 1: 12.

For a recent argument about the politics of Woolf’s overturning of aesthetic hierarchies, see Jacques Rancière , The Lost Thread: The Democracy of Modern Fiction , trans. Steve Corcoran (London: Bloomsbury, 2016) .

For the earliest formulation of this idea, see Georg Lukács , ‘The Ideology of Modernism’, in Realism in Our Time: Literature and the Class Struggle , trans. John and Necke Mander (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 17–46 . For responses to Lukács and a robust debate on the politics of modernism and expressionism, see Ernst Bloch et al, eds, Aesthetics and Politics (New York: Verso Books, 2007) .

Nancy Armstrong , Desire and Domestic Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 247 .

Sinclair, ‘Future of the Novel’, Pall Mall Gazette , 10 January 1921 .

Sinclair, ‘Future of the Novel’ . Also cited in Mahaffey, 45.

Édouard Dujardin, The Bays are Sere , 16; Les lauriers sont coupés (Paris: Librarie de la Revue Indépendante, 1888), 30 .

See Roy Pascal , The Dual Voice: Free Indirect Speech and Its Function in the Nineteenth Century European Novel (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1977) .

Ann Banfield gives a thorough linguistic account of free indirect discourse in Unspeakable Sentences: Narration and Representation in the Language of Fiction (Boston: Routledge, 1982) . For an accessible explanation aimed at the general reader, see James Wood , How Fiction Works (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2008) . For an argument about its ideological functions, see D. A. Miller , The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988) .

For more on this point, see Ann Banfield , The Phantom Table: Woolf, Fry, Russell, and the Epistemology of Modernism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000) .

See Allen McLaurin , ‘Virginia Woolf and Unanimism’, Journal of Modern Literature 9, no. 1 (1981–2), 115–22 ; and ‘Consciousness and Group Consciousness in Virginia Woolf’, in Eric Warner , ed., Virginia Woolf: a Centenary Perspective (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1984), 28–40 . In the latter piece McLaurin also notes that the association of stream of consciousness with individual minds has obscured Woolf’s interest in a group mind ( ‘Group Consciousness’, 29–30 ). For more on this movement, see Felix J. Walter , ‘Unanimism and the Novels of Jules Romains’, PMLA 51, no. 3 (1936), 863–71 .

The novel, Les Copains , was translated into English by Sydney Waterlow and Desmond MacCarthy, the latter of whom was the model for Bernard in The Waves ( McLaurin, ‘Group Consciousness’ , 34).

See McLaurin, ‘Group Consciousness’ , 36–7.

In her diary she writes: ‘Old Roger [Fry] takes a gloomy view, not of our life, but of the world’s future; but I think I detected the influence of Trotter & the herd, & so I distrusted him. Still, stepping out into Charlotte Street, where the Bloomsbury murder took place a week or two ago, & seeing a crowd swarming in the road & hearing women abuse each other & at the noise others come running with delight—all this sordidity made me think him rather likely to be right’ ( D 1 80, cited in McLaurin, ‘Group Consciousness’ , 37).

See Jane Marcus , ‘Britannia Rules the Waves,’ in Karen Lawrence , ed., Decolonizing Tradition: New Views of Twentieth-Century ‘British’ Literary Canons (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 136–62 ; and Gabrielle McIntire , ‘Heteroglossia, Monologism, and Fascism: Bernard Reads The Waves ’, Narrative 13, no. 1 (2005), 29–45 .

Jessica Berman , ‘Of Waves and Opposition: The Waves , Oswald Mosley, and the New Party’, in Merry M. Pawlowski , ed., Virginia Woolf and Fascism (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), 105–21 .

For instance, Humphrey cites as the basic stream of consciousness techniques only ‘direct interior monologue, indirect interior monologue, omniscient description, and soliloquy’ (23). It is also missing from the long list of techniques given by Hoyt Long and Richard Jean So in their recent computational study of stream of consciousness ( ‘Turbulent Flow’, 346 ).

Dorrit Cohn , Transparent Minds (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 44 . In fact Cohn finds a ‘hypertrophy of analogies’ in modernist fiction (43).

Cohn, Transparent Minds , 42.

These examples are also cited by Cohn in Transparent Minds , 44 .

James, Principles of Psychology , 1: 255.

James, Principles of Psychology , 1: 246.

James, Principles of Psychology , 1: 240–1.

James, Principles of Psychology , 1: 245–6.

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Stream-of-consciousness writing: ‘an act of trust’

Some writers seek to delve into the inner workings of their characters’ hearts and minds using this unbridled technique. we talk to four.

As the psychological novel developed in the early 20th century, some writers attempted to capture the flow of a character’s consciousness or thought processes

What is stream-of-consciousness writing? The technique involves writing down with an abandon whatever comes into your head, for example to get inside the mind of a character. It can also be used as a way of generating ideas to see what manifests on the page.

The term “stream of consciousness” was first used by author and psychologist William James, brother of the more famous Henry, in the late 19th century in his book, Principles of Psychology.

[ ‘The priest they called him’: the wild and crazy life of William S Burroughs ]

As the psychological novel developed in the early 20th century, some writers attempted to capture the flow of a character’s consciousness or thought processes, a well-known example being Ulysses by James Joyce, published in 1924. It seems timely that 100 years later, we again examine the merits of letting our creativity loose to see what forms upon the page.

I spoke to four writers who regularly use stream of consciousness in their writing practice, not only as a tool for their creativity, but also in the finished product.

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Áine Uí Fhoghlú

Áine Uí Fhoghlú: 'I described my hunger, loneliness, the sewer’s smell. I saw the only beam of light spill through the keyhole, heard the jailer’s key turning in the lock.'

From a young age I’ve had the ability, given enough detail, to transport my mind to another place where I can almost reach out and touch things physically. But to convey that sense as a writer to a reader can sometimes be a challenge.

My latest poetry collection, Mná dár mhair (Coiscéim, 2022) celebrates the lives of women, many of whom lived and died largely unnoticed. During the two years it took me to research their stories, I found a very useful exercise before drafting the poems was to practise stream-of-consciousness writing.

One of those women was Anne Devlin, the unsung hero of the 1803 Rebellion, whom history has recorded simply as Robert Emmet’s housekeeper. With the help of her own detailed account of her imprisonment in the “black hole” cell in Dublin Castle, I began to vividly imagine her reality.

Early every morning I would go inside that cell with Anne and write down what I could see, hear, taste, smell and touch. For that time, I became her. I described my hunger, loneliness, the sewer’s smell. I saw the only beam of light spill through the keyhole, heard the jailer’s key turning in the lock. I felt her limbs ache and swell, hair matted, teeth caked, hands filthy, underarms sticky. I heard the rats, crouched in the corner with her. And so, for about 15 minutes every morning, I wrote down all the random thoughts and feelings that I (Anne) was having.

[ Can you channel Jack Kerouac in an electric car? ]

Although you eventually end up using only a fraction of what you discover, the practice can give much authenticity to the creative piece that results.

I do this regularly now and find it a huge help to anchor and portray characters or events, whether in fiction or poetry.

Áine Uí Fhoghlú has won many awards for her writing, including Oireachtas na Gaeilge. She is currently working on a trilingual collection of poetry based on a personal connection with Argentina, and a bilingual collection commemorating eight Waterford women of the Revolution.

Lani O’Hanlon

Lani O’Hanlon: 'It’s a strange process to go below your skin and into your inner world and fish up what might be a pearl among all the scribbling.'

From childhood, I have been scribbling in notebooks without realising I was accessing a spontaneous, non-linear way of writing called stream of consciousness. The writer Dorothea Brande’s book Becoming a Writer (1934) describes the different methods writers use to access and write from the unconscious; some people walk or run, others scrub the floor or knit or write morning pages. What all these have in common is rhythm, monotony and silence.

There are many writing workshops on structure, craft and editing, once the material is there to work with, and this crafting, shaping and structuring transforms the unconscious stream of consciousness into art. As a dancer and somatic movement facilitator, I see this working in movement and dance. For example, a spontaneous dancer might say, “Oh I don’t want to be told how to move. I just want to move freely”. But, in fact, when they’re dancing and moving in what they think is a free way, they are repeating the same movements habitually and their bodies are not free at all. It is the same with writing.

Trying out different ways of writing feels awkward at first and not free-flowing, but the body is learning a new and more expansive movement vocabulary, exploring process and craft. One of my teachers, the poet Mark Roper, helped me a lot when he said that poets are not there to bare their soul but to bear their craft and when you feel the poem no longer belongs to you that is when you let it go into the world.

[ James Joyce was obsessed with the man Nora Barnacle ‘betrayed’ him with before they met ]

It’s a strange process to go below your skin and into your inner world and fish up what might be a pearl among all the scribbling, then lift it out into the light and scrutinise it. It is a mysterious process and one that continues to absorb and fascinate me.

I think that initial writing is best done sitting quietly and privately, saying what you might not say in public and also reading other writers, whose psyche communicates directly to yours.

Lani O’Hanlon is a poet, dancer and movement therapist. Her poetry collection Landscape of the Body, is published by The Dedalus Press (2023).

Annemarie Ní Churreáin

Annemarie Ní Churreáin: 'A lot of time is spent trying to override the rational mind and access a part of the self that sees the world with an imaginative eye.' Photograph: Barry McCall

No matter what I’m trying to write, the natural world is always my first port of call. By orientating myself in a way that is sensory and bodily, I can begin to unlock the levels of consciousness required to think creatively. In writing about Ireland’s mother-and-baby homes, for example, I spent a lot of time on the physical sites of former “care” institutions, often circling stone ruins, climbing gates, picking locks. I wanted to unfurl in myself a fresh feeling for these places. What exists today on those left-behind sites? What grows or survives there? And, crucially, how does it make me feel to stand in those spaces?

In the early stages of making a poem, a lot of time is spent trying to override the rational mind and access a part of the self that sees the world with an imaginative eye. When I’m outdoors hiking or visiting an historical ruin, I start to think in cycles and returns, in flashes and spurts. Often the weather dictates how and if a planned journey will unfold. This surrendering of one’s “plans” greatly feeds the poetic process and lets me break out of fixed or rigid patterns of thinking. Most of my early drafts are simply a tangle of words and scribbled notes.

[ How poetry is helping us preserve our past - and question our assumptions of history ]

Essentially, working with streams of consciousness is an act of trust. You have to trust the process of being with abstract and uncensored thoughts. My first task as a poet is always to follow my nose and be awake to the idea that a new poem might begin anywhere – with a word or a single touchstone image – and that every ordinary thought is potentially a portal out of which a whole new poem might evolve. I take great courage from poets like Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill or indeed Michael Hartnett or Paula Meehan, whose poems often seem touched by a bit of magic. Anyone can take a pen and begin to write but to make a poem that lights up the page is a whole different business; you need a sharp instinct, an eye for mystery and an open mind.

Annemarie Ní Churreáin is a poet and editor from Donegal. Her books include Bloodroot (Doire Press, 2017) and The Poison Glen (The Gallery Press, 2021). Her website is studiotwentyfive.com

Patrick Holloway

Patrick Holloway: 'By putting words on the page I aimed to explore the mad rush of thinking, of what happens on the inside.'

My mind never shuts up. It’s painful at the best of times. When I started writing, it was a way to hush, to excavate, and by putting words on the page I aimed to explore the mad rush of thinking, of what happens on the inside, so quickly, and all in the space of a moment. I was obsessed with writing in the close first person, like those books where the reader lives inside the mind of the character – The Butcher Boy, To the Lighthouse and The Catcher in the Rye.

Fifteen years on, my writing still lingers around these themes of identity, language and memory. When I start a new project, be it a story or novel, I tend to go back to stream of consciousness. I do this in a multitude of ways. I write out my thoughts, as they come. Many times, it is in these notes I find what I want to tackle with my characters, put them in situations where they will come to the surface. I also write their inner thoughts out at certain moments. Even for a distant third-person narrative, I tend to take pen to paper and get inside the head of that character – from this only one thing might reveal itself and make it into the story. Even characters who only appear on the periphery of the narrative, I try to get into their heads, to see who they are and what they want at that moment they appear on the page.

Maybe even now, I go back to this form of writing because I want the readers to truly understand my characters, so they cannot only relate, but feel themselves, there, then, in that moment of living. Or maybe, through stream of consciousness, I’m trying to reconcile the inner and the outer; by exploring the minds of my characters, I am exploring myself.

Patrick Holloway is the winner of the 2023 Bath Short Story prize. He is currently working on a coming-of-age novel and a short-story collection.

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Stream-of-Consciousness Technique: Joyce’s “The Dead” and Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” Essay (Critical Writing)

Introduction, heart of darkness, works cited.

Stream of consciousness is a flow of ideas and images without any particular order. Sang discusses that stream of consciousness is “composed of the continual activity of the characters’ consciousness and shower of impressions” (173). Stream of consciousness is associated with direct and indirect interior monologue.

Direct interior monologue includes the characters unuttered thoughts presented in a way that they are unregulated by the author’s language. The indirect interior monologue consists of the character’s thoughts as presented by the omniscient narrator (Sang 173).

Stream of consciousness may be characterized by a continuous flow of words that violate grammatical order. The theme of words may shift from the motif that initialized the process.

Abram & Harpham discuss that a stream of consciousness may be used as an alternative to the omniscient perspective (274). When the story is not being narrated by an all-knowing figure, it gives “the readers the illusion of experiencing events evolving before their own eyes” (Abram & Harpham 274). In this case, the reader can realize the difference between thoughts and actual events.

The stories vary in that ‘The Dead’ is narrated from a third-person point of view while the ‘Heart of Darkness’ is narrated from a first-person point of view. In the Heart of Darkness, Marlow’s vivid descriptions about people and places are closely related to his personal view about them.

One of the characteristic of stream of consciousness is that it consists of “waves upon waves of words” (Cahir 53). In ‘The Dead’, the stream of consciousness is not a continuation of the narrator’s perception. It is Gabriel’s flow of ideas from the conscious mind.

The Dead is narrated by an omniscient character. The narrator is able to present the thoughts of Gabriel in an indirect interior monologue. It differs from the Heart of Darkness direct interior monologue. The syntax is presented in correct grammar because it is an indirect interior monologue.

Gabriel stream of consciousness after the conversation with Miss Ivors states, “How cool it must be outside! How pleasant it would be to walk alone, first along the river and then through the park! The snow would be lying on the branches of trees and forming a bright cap on top of the Wellington Monument. How much more pleasant it would be there than at the supper table!” (Joyce 8).

In this part, the stream of consciousness is used to tap the emotions of the reader about the tour to the western part of Ireland. In reality, the tour is unlikely to take place. The reader is able to capture some images even though the real event did not take place. The stream of consciousness is presented as what would have happened if the real event took place.

The author uses exclamation marks to capture the wonder of visiting a new place. It may give the reader the suspense of wanting Gabriel to visit the place as the story progresses. Visiting the western part of Ireland is used in other conversations. It is the author’s means of capturing the reader’s attention on further discussions about the tour.

Joyce uses stream of consciousness on Gabriel after a conversation with her wife. The conversation resulted in the necessity to bring forth childhood memories. Gretta uses teenage memories of a skinny boy. The boy deserved sympathy.

Gabriel forms these images out of consciousness as stated by the narrator, “He saw himself as a ludicrous figure, acting as a penny-boy for his aunts, a nervous, well-meaning sentimentalist, orating to vulgarians and idealizing his own clownish lusts, the pitiable fatuous fellow he had caught a glimpse of in the mirror” (Joyce 20).

The author is able to intensify the level of sympathy of readers through Gabriel. Chatman discusses that reader has a tendency to “rehearse and comment upon past events” (194). Joyce uses the stream to make the reader reflect upon the moment Gabriel was wondering what would make a woman listen attentively to distant music. The reader may concur with Gabriel that it was unusual.

The syntax for this part is formed from short statements that are separated with commas. It indicates their perpetual flow. The images are formed in Gabriel’s mind one after another.

“He (Gabriel) wondered at his riot of emotions of an hour before. From what had it proceeded? From his aunt’s supper, from his own foolish speech, from the wine and dancing, the merry-making when saying good night in the hall, the pleasure of the walk along the river in the snow” (Joyce 22).

In this stream of consciousness, Gabriel is alone and he tries to link his wife’s behavior to a cause. On this part, the character stream of images strays from the motif. Chatman discusses that the style has no “externally motivated organization of the character’s thoughts nor can the narrator make a selection among them” (194).

He was linking events (possible causes) to the effect (Gretta’s behavior). When he reaches at the image of Aunt Julia, he shifts from causes to pitying Aunt Julia. It shows that the stream of consciousness is almost unconscious (Sang 176).

The stream of consciousness is presented as a fantasy. It captures past events that the reader was unaware of. The narrator captures the moment of their courtship that otherwise would not fit into the context.

Gabriel was taken into a reflection that “A heliotrope envelope was lying besides his breakfast-cup and he was caressing it with his hand. Birds twittering in the ivy and the sunny web of the curtain was shimmering along the floor: he could not eat for happiness. They were standing…” (Joyce 17 & 18).

From the statement “he could not eat for happiness”, it indicates the characteristic of an indirect interior monologue where the author tampers with the order of the flow of ideas. The author uses the moment to explain to the reader Gabriel’s behavior after the presentations in the hall.

There is a contrast of thoughts. His wife thinks about the skinny boy she had in childhood. On the other hand, Gabriel is thinking about the best moments they had together. The reader may pity either Gabriel or the dead boy.

In The Death , the utilization of stream-of consciousness technique serves primarily the function of emphasizing the plot’s plausibility. The application of the same technique in Conrad’s novel The Heart of Darkness appears to serve the function ensuring the structural validity of the narration.

The author uses stream of consciousness much the same as in The Dead . It is used to capture the wonder of the unknown.

Marlow brainstorms that “Imagine him here – the very end of the world, a sea the color of lead, a sky the color of smoke, a kind of ship about as rigid as a concertina – and going up this river with stores, or orders, or what you like. Sand-banks, marshes, forests, savages, – precious little to eat fit for a civilized man…” (Conrad 8).

Conrad’s stream of consciousness technique is used more often than in The Dead . They are short statements separated by commas to indicate a free flow of images. They are presented from the direct interior monologue. In that case, the author has little influence on the outcome and arrangement of words (Sang 173).

Readers have a hard time shifting from descriptions and explanations given by Marlow to his stream of consciousness. The thoughts are derived from his past experience which he uses to form his expectations of the new places he visits. The following quotation illustrates the statement’s legitimacy.

“The broadening waters flowed through a mob of wooded islands; you lost your way on that river as you would in a desert, and butted all day long against shoals, trying to find the channel, till you thought yourself bewitched and cut off for ever from everything you had known once -somewhere – far away – in another existence perhaps…” (Conrad 67).

Conrad’s use of stream of consciousness is similar to its use in The Dead where Gabriel gives a description of the western part of Ireland. It generates suspense because the reader develops a longing for the character to visit these places.

Conrad uses the narrator’s stream of consciousness to allow readers to gain knowledge about his past and the kind of person he is. Self-reflecting individuals appear as those who are overwhelmed by their deep-seated irrational fears.

As a result of this, their expression of reality is distorted. Marlow expresses his uncertainty about reality by the statement, “The reality – the reality, I tell you – fades. The inner truth is hidden – luckily, luckily” (Conrad 11). From his massive self reflections, he doubts what he sees from what actually exists.

The reader learns about the character of Kurtz even before they are introduced to him. This is because they have been provided with bits of information about the character from Marlow’s stream of consciousness.

The use of the technique here is similar to its use in The Dead . It creates a longing for the reader to meet the character and the narrator to visit the places he describes. Readers become eager to see the narrator in the actual place.

Conrad uses the narrator’s stream of consciousness to tell the readers about his fondness with the sea. From the short stream, Marlow muses “there it is before you – smiling, frowning, inviting, grand, mean, insipid, or savage, and always mute with an air of whispering, ‘Come and find out’ (Conrad 23).

By showing that Marlow interprets what the wind says, the reader can see the character of a seaman. It would be less effective if the author would allow the narrator to describe himself. People rarely see themselves as other people would. The reader can recognize his familiarity with the sea when he interprets the wind.

In the middle part of the novel, Marlow engages in a prolonged stream of consciousness that tends to justify his behavior of reflection and flow of images. The reflection is almost a page long. The Dead uses stream of consciousness technique of shorter lengths.

Marlow starts his flow with a conviction about truth that “the mind of man is capable of anything – because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future” (Conrad 73). From this perspective, the author assures the reader that Marlow is not completely irrational. He has reasoning and justification.

Marlow thinks that “… Principles won’t do. Acquisitions, clothes, pretty rags – rags that would fly off at the first good shake. No; you want a deliberate belief. An appeal to me in this fiendish row – is there? Very well; I hear; I admit, but I have a voice, too, and for good or evil mine is the speech that cannot be silenced…” (Conrad 73).

Marlow seems to justify his reasons for someone within himself. Sang discusses the importance of the semicolon in ensuring the continuity of the stream in an ungrammatical order (175). The words are almost repetitive. For example, Marlow thinks “I hear; I admit, but I have a voice, too” (Conrad 73). ‘I hear, I admit’ are almost related. They are short statements that can be mistaken for childish talk.

The technique using short related statements is also used in the narrators thought about the slaves. Marlow sympathizes that “… They were not enemies, they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly now – nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation…” (Conrad 31).

From this illustration, ‘nothing’ is repeated almost immediately. Enemies and criminals are words that contrast. Following the two statements with “they were nothing earthly now” shows a shift from the motif of criminals or enemies. It is similar to Gabriel’s shift from Gretta’s cause of reflection to pitying Aunt Julia (Joyce 22).

Cahir discusses that the technique uses concepts, symbols and images which are the center of the character’s contemplation or meditation (53). It is evident in Marlow’s stream of consciousness about natural environment and Gabriel’s obsession with Miss Ivor’s tour suggestions. Conrad uses short phrases more commonly than Joyce. Joyce almost uses complete sentences to form the technique.

The technique is recognized through the flow of short phrases separated by commas or semi-colon. Cahir discusses that stream of consciousness “assembles words through an association of images, ideas, and emotions rather the continuity of a story” (53). In most cases, ideas are initialized by past images or future expectations.

Abram, Mabie & Geoffrey Harpham. A Glossary of Terms . Boston: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2009. Print.

Cahir, Linda. Literature into Film: Theory and Practical Approaches . Jefferson: McFarland, 2006. Print.

Chatman, Seymour. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film . New York: Cornell University Press, 1978. Print.

Conrad, Joseph 1899, Heart of Darkness . Web.

Joyce, James 1914, The Dead . PDF file. Web.

Sang, Yanxia. “An Analysis of the Stream of Consciousness Technique in To The Lighthouse.” Asian Social Science . 6.9 (2010):173-179. Web.

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IvyPanda. (2019, April 19). Stream-of-Consciousness Technique: Joyce's “The Dead” and Conrad's “Heart of Darkness”. https://ivypanda.com/essays/stream-of-consciousness-technique-joyces-the-dead-and-conrads-heart-of-darkness-critical-writing/

"Stream-of-Consciousness Technique: Joyce's “The Dead” and Conrad's “Heart of Darkness”." IvyPanda , 19 Apr. 2019, ivypanda.com/essays/stream-of-consciousness-technique-joyces-the-dead-and-conrads-heart-of-darkness-critical-writing/.

IvyPanda . (2019) 'Stream-of-Consciousness Technique: Joyce's “The Dead” and Conrad's “Heart of Darkness”'. 19 April.

IvyPanda . 2019. "Stream-of-Consciousness Technique: Joyce's “The Dead” and Conrad's “Heart of Darkness”." April 19, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/stream-of-consciousness-technique-joyces-the-dead-and-conrads-heart-of-darkness-critical-writing/.

1. IvyPanda . "Stream-of-Consciousness Technique: Joyce's “The Dead” and Conrad's “Heart of Darkness”." April 19, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/stream-of-consciousness-technique-joyces-the-dead-and-conrads-heart-of-darkness-critical-writing/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Stream-of-Consciousness Technique: Joyce's “The Dead” and Conrad's “Heart of Darkness”." April 19, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/stream-of-consciousness-technique-joyces-the-dead-and-conrads-heart-of-darkness-critical-writing/.

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William James on the Stream of Consciousness (1890)

William James, The Principles of Psychology (London: Macmillan & Co., 1890).

First published as a standalone volume on February 2, 1922, James Joyce’s Ulysses turns one hundred this week. Even if you have never immersed yourself in the modern reimagining of Homer’s seafaring epic, a related phrase may have drifted across your awareness: the name for a narrative technique employed by Joyce, Djuna Barnes, Jean Toomer, Virginia Woolf, and myriad other writers that rub shoulders within the ever-bulging periodic and aesthetic borders of modernist literature: stream of consciousness .

Scholars believe “stream of consciousness” was first used as a description of literary style by the British writer May Sinclair, during a review of Dorothy Richardson’s novels for The Egoist in 1918. Eschewing the “philosophical cant of the nineteenth century” — mannered depictions of the world that passed for “realism” — May prefers the mess of the mind. “Reality is thick and deep, too thick and too deep, and at the same time too fluid to be cut with any convenient carving-knife.” To capture this fluidity, the novelist must “plunge in”, which Richardson does in her monumental thirteen-novel Pilgrimage sequence. “In this series there is no drama, no situation, no set scene. Nothing happens. It is just life going on and going. It is Miriam Henderson’s stream of consciousness going on and on”, writes May. Although James Wood and others have argued that there is nothing uniquely modernist about representing “the movement of the mind” upon the page, the psychological theory of mind that informs May’s review can be traced to a chapter in William James’ The Principles of Psychology (1890).

Harvard professor, physician, investigator of psychic communication, “father of American psychology”, and the brother of novelist Henry James, William James begins “The Stream of Thought” by acknowledging that any psychological vocabulary will be rough-hewn when it comes to the fine-cut facets of mental phenomena, comparing what follows to “a painter’s first charcoal sketch upon his canvas, in which no niceties appear”. But the psychologist is being modest, for he immediately launches into a polished discussion of “anesthetic somnambulists”, subconscious personages, and the possibility of thoughts existing without a thinker. This is all a preface for the larger concept: that our minds seem to ebb and flow with ideas, while emotions behave almost tidally, rising and falling in relation to intangible forces, as if a moon presses gravitationally upon our psychic seas.

James was not the first to analogize the mind as a river — Alexander Bain had used the phrase “stream of consciousness” in 1855 and the Buddhist concept of “mindstream” ( citta-santāna ), characterizes selfhood in a similar way. In The Principles of Psychology , “the stream of thought” becomes a carefully chosen image for the flux of subjectivity: how ideas, feelings, and sensations, both present and past, cohere into the experience of a continuous self, that ever-present “I”, which meanders through the mind from childhood until our deaths and possibly beyond. Invoking Heraclitus by name, James repurposes his idea — that a person can never wade into the same river twice: “ no state once gone can recur and be identical with what it was before. . . . In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life .” Beneath this stream, to continue his fluvial metaphor, sits the silt and pebbled bed of the unconscious, voluntary and involuntary memories, and even alternative persona. In contrast to the theories of Pierre Janet, Jean-Martin Charcot, and other early psychologists who practiced at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris (and cultivated damaging theories regarding female hysteria), James thought “the fact that the mind contains multiple streams of consciousness which at times rise to the surface was not something to be feared”, writes Alicia Puglionesi . In other words, the self contains multitudes and always has.

If consciousness is a stream, what are the banks and channels that guide its course? James alighted on a concern that would preoccupy spelunkers of cognition in the decades to follow: the deadening effects of habit, the diminishing returns of repetitive pleasures, whether gustatorial, aesthetic, or spiritual. As if trying to refresh the perception of his reader’s glazed eyes, James lapses literary when addressing the topic, assuming the voice of a world-weary male:

From one year to another we see things in new lights. What was unreal has grown real, and what was exciting is insipid. The friends we used to care the world for are shrunken to shadows. . . once so divine, the stars, the wood, and the waters, how now so dull and common! the young girls that brought an aura of infinity, at present hardly distinguishable existences; the pictures so empty; and as for the books, what *was* there to find so mysteriously significant in Goethe, or in John Mill so full of weight?

The turn of the century saw a proliferation of treatises on the dulling effects of routine. Works such as Walter Pater’s The Renaissance (1873) Albert Lemoine’s L’Habitude et L’Instinct (1875), Georg Simmel’s “ The Metropolis in Mental Life ”(1903), and Viktor Shklovsky’s “ Art as Technique ” (1917) evidence the widespread concern — voiced by philosophers, art historians, literary theorists, sociologists, and novelists across a wealth of languages — about the way increasingly mechanized, mediated, and urbanized societies downregulate stimulus response. While Pater speculated that “our failure is to form habits”, Samuel Beckett would concede in a 1930 essay on Marcel Proust that the stream of consciousness only appears consistent due to the regulatory effects of habitual action: “Habit then is the generic term for the countless treaties between the countless subjects that constitute the individual and their countless correlative objects.” Though influenced by Henri Bergson, Beckett’s idea may not have been possible without the work of William James, who dedicated a 1914 essay to the topic, and meditated on habit and the continuity of selfhood at length in “The Stream of Thought”.

“Annihilate a mind at any instant, cut its thought through whilst yet uncompleted, and examine the object present to the cross-section thus suddenly made; you will find, not the bald word in process of utterance, but that word suffused with the whole idea”. Figure from William James, The Principles of Psychology (1890) — Source .

Art has long offered an antidote to what James describes as the decay of excitement into insipidity. In Percy Shelley’s famous dictum : “Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar”. From Stephen Hero , his early draft of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man , to Finnegans Wake , written in a stream of unconsciousness — “an imitation of the dream-state” — Joyce maintained a cryptic interest in the ability of literary language to prompt epiphany , defined, by his character Stephen, as: “a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture of in a memorable phrase in the mind itself. . . . it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments.” In Ulysses , the “stream of consciousness” technique not only faithfully represents the mind by violating the supposed objectivity of nineteenth-century realism, as May Sinclair described, but leaves its reader, perhaps, with an enhanced consciousness of their own cognition.

Take, for instance, a scene in the “ Lestrygonians ” episode that occurs along the waters, when the adman Leopold Bloom crosses Dublin’s O’Connell Bridge over the River Liffey. We begin in the third person, as a narrator describes how Bloom scans the river, finding a clever advertisement — for a London clothier, selling trousers in its Dublin outlet at eleven shillings a pair — mounted on a docked and rocking rowboat:

His eyes sought answer from the river and saw a rowboat rock at anchor on the treacly swells lazily its plastered board. Kino’s 11/- Trousers Good idea that. Wonder if he pays rent to the corporation. How can you own water really? It’s always flowing in a stream, never the same, which in the stream of life we trace. Because life is a stream.

The ad is not summarized or offset by quotation marks: we see it as Bloom does. And suddenly, without marked transition, we are inside his mind, surfing the stream of consciousness as Bloom reflects, like Heraclitus and James before him, on the everchanging fluidity of inner and outer life. It’s a brilliant passage, for — as aqueous advertising seeps into free-flowing thought — Bloom himself becomes an advertisement for Joyce’s style, how the author approximates the treacly swells of cognition, plunging us deep into the thick river of reality.

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What is Stream of Consciousness Writing — Methods & Tips

A s a writer, stream of consciousness may be fun to write but unenjoyable to read. Or for you, the reverse may be true. When talking about screenwriting, stream of consciousness may not be a method frequently used on the page but can be used and benefited from in the pre-writing process or even with visual elements on screen. This article will answer what is stream of consciousness writing by providing narrative examples and film examples, while also demonstrating another use of the method to help screenwriters (or any writer) connect to their best work.

Defining Stream of Consciousness

Stream of consciousness definition.

So, what exactly do we mean by stream of consciousness? Well, if we can get a little "heady" on you, let's break it down. Try to think of your brain activity as constantly moving forward, like a car on a road or, hey, an actual stream!

But for this analogy, let's stick with the car.

When we sit down to write, especially any sort of narrative , there is a lot of "starting" and "stopping." We think of one line and we write it down (the car goes forward) but then we stop to think about what the next line should be (the car stops). Therefore, a typical way to write is like mental rush-hour traffic, where the flow of ideas are constantly interrupted, considered, planned, etc.

Stream of consciousness writing is a wide-open highway where your mental car can drive at full speed with nothing to block or detour ideas.

Now, hopefully that analogy made sense but just in case it didn't, here's a more formal stream of consciousness definition.

Stream of Consciousness Definition

What is stream of consciousness writing.

Stream of consciousness writing is a method of writing that captures the myriad of thoughts and feelings that pass through the mind. This method’s purpose is to allow these thoughts to pass through without any inhibitors. It’s quite literally capturing the “stream” of your consciousness.

The term actually originated in psychology before the literary world ever got a hold of it. It was coined in 1855 by Alexander Bain in the first edition of “The Senses and the Intellect.” William James in 1890 used it in “The Principles of Psychology.” But the first person to apply it to a literary text was May Sinclair, discussing Dorothy Richardson’s use of the term in her novel, “Pointed Roofs” in 1915.

This is different from an internal monologue. Internal monologue relays thoughts in a linear and logical way. Stream of consciousness can be marked often by non-linear and unusual grammatical or syntax structures, for it represents the more natural flow of thought. This is why the nature of this is often long-winded writing.

Stream of consciousness vs internal monologue

Internal monologue is logical and often linear. Thoughts coherently move from one to the next.
Stream of consciousness writing is often non-linear, characterized by nontraditional grammar and syntax.

Now that we know the basics of stream of consciousness, let's look at some quick examples to make sure we understand the concept. Here's Senior Lecturer Elizabeth Delf from Oregon State University on what this writing style looks like on the page and how it shapes the storytelling.

Stream of Consciousness Writing Example

Let's move on to discuss more of the benefits of stream of consciousness writing and look at some more examples from literature and film in detail.

Why is This Important?

Benefits of stream of consciousness writing.

Because of its cerebral nature, stream of consciousness writing is great for writing about consciousness or as different consciousnesses. What does that mean? It lets the writer explore and write to a truer experience, one that is more reflective of what’s happening inside the mind. This kind of practice would be good for writing about a drug experience, a hallucination, or even describing a dream world or some other trance-like state.

The reason it’s used in narratives and films alike, is to make the viewer or the reader truly experience those thoughts as the character is thinking them. It doesn’t just relay thoughts to the audience for informational purposes, but creates an experience of thinking.

Stream of consciousness writing isn’t just for the narrative. It is also a brainstorming technique to encourage creativity and intuitive writing. This can be especially helpful for writer’s block.

Stream of Consciousness Examples

Use stream of consciousness in movies.

In film, stream of consciousness isn’t always used as a writing technique, but instead may express itself in the visual elements on screen.

Let’s consider David Lynch .

Lynch comes to mind as the majority of his films could be considered a kind of stream of consciousness. Let’s look at one in particular... Inland Empire .

Laura Dern’s character, Nikki, is an actress who gets lost in her new role. Her real self and the character she’s playing start to blend into one. Aside from the distorted cinematography, the film focuses on the subjectivity of Nikki’s experiences. It goes from one hallucination to the next that feels more like an association than logical plot structure.

Whether you enjoyed this nightmarish drama or not, it’s a true experience of stream of consciousness using visual elements, auditory elements, and scene by scene surrealism as a way to show the character’s perception. The audience experiences the messiness that is her mind.

You could understand this without ever hearing David Lynch explain the film. But even more fascinating is how the filmmaker’s stream of consciousness helped create the film.

Caption: Lynch’s stream of consciousness process

In the video above, he talks about his usual process — how when he gets an idea, he writes it down little-by-little, and eventually, it turns into a script. With Inland Empire , he explains his process as writing an idea down, then going right out to shoot it. Getting another idea, and then going to shoot it. He states he didn’t have a clue of how one idea was related to the other.

In this case, his entire filmmaking process for this film could be considered stream of consciousness! Which, because we’re talking about David Lynch, may not actually come as a surprise to most of us, but perhaps gives more clarity to how and why the movie unfolded the way it did.

Stream of consciousness writing examples in a screenplay

And of course, screenplays can have stream of consciousness in their dialogue or voiceover, but it’s not as common. It’s not as common because most of the time when a character is going on some tangent, it’s considered an inner monologue . Keep in mind, an internal monologue is different than stream because it follows a coherent path — often linear, going from one thought to the next, even if it appears as rambling.

And these monologues are in a ton of scripts.

But that being said, there are examples in cinema that do use stream of consciousness in the actual script.

The voiceovers in The Big Lebowski border on stream of consciousness. Often going from one thought to the next with unconventional grammar, syntax and heavy use of association. To be fair, the associations are fairly logical in instances but this is interspersed with dream sequences that are absolutely stream of consciousness.

What is Stream of Consciousness Writing The Big Lebowski Excerpt StudioBinder Screenwriting Software

Stream of Consciousness Example in The Big Lebowski • Read Full Scene

But before the movies, this technique was used as a way to describe and dissect literature in the early 20th century.

Using stream of consciousness in fiction

Stream of consciousness is most common in fiction. Novels are longer winded mediums than anything else and this kind of writing can be used to not only reveal thoughts of a character but reveal the inner workings of their mind.

The first time this psychological term was used in a literary sense was by May Sinclaire in 1915, when she was reviewing Dorothy Richardson’s Pointed Roofs .

“On one side was the little grey river, on the other long wet grass repelling and depressing. Not far ahead was the roadway which led, she supposed to the farm where they were to drink new milk. She would have to walk with someone when they came to the road, and talk. She wondered whether this early morning walk would come, now, every day. Her heart sank at the thought.”

Virginia Woolf uses stream of consciousness throughout the iconic Mrs. Dalloway :

“Her only gift was knowing people almost by in-stinct, she thought, walking on. If you put her in a room with some one, up went her back like a cat's; or she purred. Devonshire House, Bath House, the house with the china cockatoo, she had seen them all lit up once; and remembered Sylvia, Fred, Sally Seton-such hosts of people; and dancing all night; and the waggons plodding past to market; and driving home across the Park. She remembered once throwing a shilling into the Serpentine. But every one remembered; what she loved was this, here, now, in front of her; the fat lady in the cab. Did it matter then, she asked herself, walk-ing towards Bond Street, did it matter that she must in-evitably cease completely; all this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely?”

Woolf takes us through this paragraph of past people and places, through means of nostalgic associations.

Brainstorming Tips for Screenwriters

Stream of consciousness brainstorming.

In screenwriting, stream of consciousness writing doesn’t happen on the page per se. While it can be voiceover or dialogue, generally speaking, you won’t want to go on tangents in the confines of a visual medium.

But that being said, the most powerful brainstorming tool for a screenwriter, or really for any writer, is stream of consciousness pre-writing.

Because stream of consciousness writing is often long-winded, lacking structure, it may seem unorganized. But there is still organization there.

Stream of consciousness is the result of the way your brain is naturally ordering its thoughts, feelings, and all of the energy in between. This is powerful. Trust it. Deeper patterns appear.

Ones that are harder to access when you’re obsessively thinking about plot, theme, and character. This is what people refer to as flow state. Use it!

Let’s write!

With stream of consciousness brainstorm writing, we don’t stop or hesitate. We just write without objectively thinking about what to put on the page.

So rather than just free writing, here are some stream of consciousness writing exercises you can try to help discover more about your characters.

Set a timer and just go for it.

You can start with how you’re feeling or if you’re thinking of a character you started creating...what if they felt this way?
You’re at a party — what’s going on, who do you run into, who do you avoid?
Imagine your character is on a sailboat with 10 plus people. They suddenly recognize someone on the boat. Who is it?

Keep in mind, these just become regular writing prompts if you think too much about them. The goal here is to get into the flow of your natural thoughts, free of all ideas about those thoughts.

Don’t hesitate and just keep writing until that timer goes off!

Creative Writing Prompts

If you’re feeling up for it and want to practice more stream of consciousness, give the next post a try. We’ve provided over 80 prompts, that will help get you into that flow state!

Up Next: Writing Prompts →

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Essay on Stream of Consciousness Technique in James Joyce's "Ulysses"

Related Papers

Yusuf Eradam

Mohamed Yassine Benhmeida

Mohamed Yacine Ben Hmeida

James Joyce and Virginia Woolf are two representative figures of the modernist fiction, known for the use of the Stream of Consciousness technique. They are often categorized by the same features concerning this technique; however, their use of this technique may converge and diverge. This research is a stylistic investigation of the use of Stream of Consciousness in Joyce’s A Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man and Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. It also explores Joyce’s Epiphanies and Woolf’s Moment of Being in the aforementioned novels. An eclectic method that draws on insights from psychoanalysis, stylistics and Narratology is adopted to this study. The findings concerning the convergence in the use of Stream of Consciousness in the two aforementioned novels could be summarized as follows: the implication of the aspect of focalization, the use of free association and the use of time-montage devices. As for the divergence in the use of the Stream of Consciousness in Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, it is related to the use of Free Indirect Discourse, Space-Montage and the guidance of the author. However, in Joyce’s A Portrait of that Artist as a Young Man, it is distinguished by the use of Interior Monologue and the evolution of language. This research might pave the way for an extended study to the technique of Stream of Consciousness in a rather exhaustively psychological perspective.

Lizzy Welby

This article aimed to find out the use of Stream of Consciousness in the following novels: Mrs. Dalloway, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, The Sound and the Fury, State of War and Pilgrimage. Findings showed that The SOC technique is characterized by the following salient features: unorganized succession of images, fluid ramblings of the mind’s conversations with itself, focused contents of a character’s mind at a given point in space and time and evident skip from one character to another in the middle of the page. In presenting the SOC technique, the different authors have used the following literary devices: flashback, foreshadowing and motif. To enhance the teaching of stream of consciousness technique in fiction, the following suggestions are offered: using motivation strategy through using slides presentation of snippets or excerpts from the novel’, developing literary competence in vocabulary, form, conventions and symbols, giving prior library research on stream of c...

[A]theists […] go howling for the priest and they dying and why […] because they’re afraid of hell […] I know. So says Molly Bloom in her eight sentence soliloquy in the closing chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses and in doing so engages our evolved cognitive facility to monitor sources of representation (to keep track of who knows that the terror of hell is known in the mind of another), that is, to metarepresent them. The ability to imagine the thoughts spiral through the mind of another is known to cognitive psychologists as ‘mind-reading’ or ‘Theory of Mind’. This enables us to endow literary characters with a range of emotions, thoughts, desires and, due to our metarepresentational ability, assign each degrees of validity according to the source of the representation (i.e the characters and the narrator). Keeping up with levels of intentionality, to give it its critical gloss, in order to rake a text for clues as to the mental states of its characters becomes more problematic for the reader who has to contend with the complexities of a text such as Ulysses. But as Lisa Zunshine has noted, we are able to attribute mental states to fictional characters because our ability to do so is ‘crucially mediated by the workings of our metarepresentational ability’. This paper will discuss the dizzying multi-representations of Joyce’s fictional phallogocentric world of turn-of-the-century Dublin as mediated through the thoughts of his ruminative androgyne Leopold Bloom who the author sets in perfect textual relief to the more literary Stephen Dedalus. Unlike Stephen, who increasingly shuns the beery bravado of the masculine world and retreats into a wandering silence, Bloom displays a rare capacity to ‘see’ Dublin’s socio-cultural ideologies through the eyes and minds of its atomized population. He has, in effect, the ability to markedly influence the reader’s interpretation of each character that weaves its faltering way through Joyce’s vertiginous textual tapestry. I hope to demonstrate that, even though Bloom ‘exists’ only as black marks on a white page, an entity composed entirely of syntax, our evolved mammalian brains are able to emotionally invest in, as well as assign a weighty degree of ‘truth-value’ to the introspective contemplations of the author’s ink-and-paper mind-reader, Leopold Bloom.

Adam J. Cuthbert

This paper explores the creative impact of James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Ulysses (1922) on Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel (1929) and Of Time and the River (1935). Specifically, it addresses similarities in their cinematic representations of the stream of consciousness that demonstrate practice of the 'camera-eye' as an intermedial focalisation technique, with Wolfe building on Joyce's earlier methods. This paper is concerned with how the camera-eye mediates the stream of consciousness of the autobiographical focaliser - Stephen Dedalus in Portrait and Ulysses, and Eugene Gant in Angel and River - as moving visual images.

Payam Karem

Stephen Rowntree

Nouchine Etemad

International Journal of Research Publication and Reviews

DR N A D I Y A H KHUSHBOO

In the novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man James Joyce prototyped innovation to a world, which was changing, where foundations like public activity, religion and free enterprise were brought to question. Every one of the highlights of innovation: solid wish to get away from the principles; wish to discover ways for man's situation throughout everyday life; and examinations in style and structures are to be found in Joyce's books. Numerous parts of innovation from this novel had an extraordinary impact upon the advancement of the pioneer development itself and made James Joyce unrivaled innovator author. The most noticeable of innovator methods in a picture of the craftsman are the "continuous flow" abstract style, topics of universe and individual, unprecedented extraordinary language, Kunstleroman plot. James Joyce utilizes inside speech and the continuous flow, consequently the essayist predicts his later strategies.

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essay on stream of consciousness technique

IMAGES

VIDEO

COMMENTS

Stream of Consciousness

Difference Between Stream of Consciousness and Free Writing

Difference between Traditional Prose and Stream of Consciousness:

How to Write Stream of Consciousness?

Examples of Stream of Consciousness in Literature

Example #1 Ulysses by James Joyce

Example #2 Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

Example #3 The British Museum Is Falling Down by David Lodge

Example #4 Notes from The Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Example #5 As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

Example #6 On the Road by Jack Kerouac

Function of Stream of Consciousness

Synonyms of Stream of Consciousness

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What is Stream of Consciousness? | Definition & Examples

What is Stream of Consciousness? - Transcript (English and Spanish Subtitles Available in Video, Click HERE for Spanish Transcript)

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Interested in more video lessons? View the full series:

stream of consciousness

The History of Stream of Consciousness

Elements of Stream of Consciousness

Why Writers Use Stream of Consciousness

Stream of Consciousness vs. Internal Monologue

Stream of Consciousness vs. Freewriting

Writers Known for Stream of Consciousness

Examples of Stream of Consciousness in Literature

Further Resources on Stream of Consciousness

Related Terms

Stream of Consciousness: A Literary Device

Etymology of Stream of Consciousness

Meaning of Stream of Consciousness

Common Features of and Stream of Consciousness

Types of Stream of Consciousness

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What is Stream of Consciousness Writing — Methods & Tips

Defining Stream of Consciousness

Stream of Consciousness Definition

Stream of consciousness vs internal monologue

Stream of Consciousness Writing Example

Why is This Important?

Stream of Consciousness Examples

Caption: Lynch’s stream of consciousness process