Stream of consciousness

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In psychology and philosophy stream of consciousness, introduced by William James, is the set of constantly changing inner thoughts and sensations which an individual has while conscious.

In literary criticism, stream of consciousness denotes a literary technique which seeks to describe an individual's point of view by giving the written equivalent of the character's thought processes. Stream-of-consciousness writing is strongly associated with the modernist movement.

With its rapid, unconnected association of objects, geometrical shapes and numerology Sir Thomas Browne's Discourse The Garden of Cyrus (1658) may, upon examination of its text, be considered one of the very earliest examples of stream-of-consciousness writing. One early and influential stream-of-consciousness novel is Édouard Dujardin's Les Lauriers sont coupes (1888). Tolstoy used something similar to the stream-of-consciousness technique in Anna Karenina (1877) in the portions leading to Anna's suicide; another early example of Arthur Schnitzler's 1900 short story Leutnant Gust.

A few of the most famous works to employ the technique are James Joyce's Ulysses (in particular Molly Bloom's soliloquy), Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and Jack Kerouac's On the Road. The technique has also been parodied, notably by David Lodge in the final chapter of The British Museum Is Falling Down. Stream-of-consciousness writing is characterised by associative leaps that can make the prose difficult to follow. Typically, writers employ very long sentences which move from one thought to another. Sometimes, writers avoid punctuation altogether in order to prevent artificial breaks in the "stream."

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