stream of consciousness

a style in literature that is used to represent a character's feelings and thoughts as they experience them, using long, continuous pieces of text without obvious organization or structure:

a stream-of-consciousness novel/style

A literary style in which a character's thoughts, feelings, and reactions are depicted in a continuous flow uninterrupted by objective description or conventional dialogue. James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Marcel Proust are among its notable early exponents.

as modifier ‘a stream-of-consciousness monologue’

A person's thoughts and conscious reactions to events, perceived as a continuous flow. The term was introduced by William James in his Principles of Psychology (1890).

the continuous unedited chronological flow of conscious experience through the mind

interior monologue

a usually extended representation in monologue of a fictional character's thought and feeling

‘Other authors have experimented with putting their stream-of-consciousness narrators in motion with mixed results, since the awkwardness of self narrated movement introduces a dissonance into the narration.’

‘As a result the book is fiery, but not entirely cohesive; at times it resembles a stream-of-consciousness monologue.’

‘This makes it feel stream-of-consciousness even though the arrangements are serious, the extra quirks - toy percussion and piano, a choppy Spanish guitar - woven in with care.’

‘Updating the stream-of-consciousness technique of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, Shaw transforms his dreams into a droll epic crammed with postwar American flotsam and jetsam.’

‘It makes one think it was a kind of stream of consciousness, a dream writing.’

‘Bleached of punctuation, the words flow freely in a stream of consciousness manner reminiscent of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf.’

‘Did Basu want to use stream of consciousness as her literary métier?’

‘She was a pioneer of the stream-of-consciousness technique, narrating the action through the mind of her heroine Miriam.’

‘In addition to that, this time I have more of an idea of what to expect in terms of the style in which the book is written, the whole stream of consciousness, free association thing.’

‘It was the most challenging of the pieces with stream-of-consciousness dialogue and monologues freely mixed together as a man and a woman meet on a beach.’