What is Stream of Consciousness? | Definition, Examples, & Analysis (2025)

Definition and origins

Stream of consciousness is a narrative style or technique that tries to capture the thoughts, emotions, and experiences of the character, often through incorporating sensory information, incomplete thoughts and ideas, and unusual syntax and grammar. These language features help to mimic the often illogical, fragmentary, and distracted nature of human thought processes. Readers are effectively privy to the personal thoughts of the character or narrator through a type of inner monologue.

The term was first coined by William James in The Principles of Psychology:

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. (1893, [2019])

This form was popular among modernist writers, such as Dorothy Richardson, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, and Marcel Proust.

May Sinclair was the first critic to use the term in her review of Dorothy Richardson’s serial work Pilgrimage in The Egoist in 1918, where she discusses how the reader is given insights into Richardson’s protagonist Miriam Henderson:

In this series there is no drama, no situation, no set scene. Nothing happens. It is just life going on and on. It is Miriam Henderson’s stream of consciousness going on and on […] In identifying herself with this life, which is Miriam’s stream of consciousness, Miss Richardson produces her effect of being the first, of getting closer to reality than any of our novelists who are trying so desperately to get close. (“The Novels of Dorothy Richardson”)

As Jane Hu explains, stream of consciousness differs from a dramatic monologue or soliloquy, both of which have an implied audience; instead

Stream of consciousness style is often identified by fictional techniques such as lack of punctuation, long and sometimes agrammatical sentences, and a series of unrelated impressions. Stream of consciousness technique tries to represent a character’s general mental state before it is condensed, organized, or edited down into narrative coherence or sense. While stream of consciousness is often read as an avant-garde technique, its aims were to get closer to the ‘reality’ of human thought processes. (“Stream of Consciousness,” Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism, 2016)

A key example of stream of consciousness is in T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock” (1915) in which the speaker struggles to summon the courage to approach a woman:

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.

(The Waste Land, Prufrock, The Hollow Men and Other Poems, [2022])

The speaker in Eliot’s poem flits between different thoughts; when he imagines walking upon the beach, for example, his train of thought then drifts to mermaids. The fragmented nature of the poem reflects the indecision and frustration of the speaker who is unable to properly articulate his emotions and desires.

In this study guide, we will explore the features of stream of consciousness, as well as highlight some key examples of this in literature.

Features of stream of consciousness

Some of the features of stream-of-conscious writing include:

• Unusual syntax or grammar
• Free association
• Sensory imagery/information
• Repetition

In this section, we will explore these features in further depth.

Unusual syntax or grammar

Stream-of-consciousness writing often deviates from formal rules of syntax and grammar, replicating the character’s incomplete thoughts. This is exemplified in the following extract, taken from James Joyce’s 1922 text Ulysses (one of the most famous examples of stream of consciousness within fiction), from the perspective of the character Leopold Bloom:

Gasworks. Whooping cough they say it cures. Good job Milly never got it. Poor children! Doubles them up black and blue with convulsions. Shame really. Got off lightly with illness compared. Only measles. Flaxseed tea. Scarlatina, influenza epidemics. Canvassing for death. Don’t miss this chance. Dogs’ home over there. Poor old Athos! Be good to Athos, Leopold, is my last wish. My will be done. We obey them in the grave. ([2017])

This passage, as is characteristic of Joyce’s novel, is comprised of “incomplete, often verbless syntagms which simulate Bloom’s mental leaps as he associates ideas” (Monika Fludernik, An Introduction to Narratology, 2009).

Free association

Free association, a psychoanalytic technique, describes how a word or image may prompt other thoughts, often without a logical connection. This is reflected in the stream-of-consciousness style, highlighting how the cognitive connections we make are not necessarily logical or clear. As Robert Humphrey writes,

All stream-of-consciousness fiction is greatly dependent on the principles of free association. This is true of such different-textured techniques as direct interior monologue and simple omniscient description of consciousness. (Stream of Consciousness in the Modern Novel, 2023)

Sensory imagery/information

The inclusion of sensory imagery is often used in stream-of-consciousness writing to reflect how different sensory inputs can distract us and open up new lines of thought. In Ulysses, we can see how sensory cues, in this case, smell, can evoke memories and shape the thoughts of the narrator. In Ulysses, when Leopold Bloom smells a woman’s perfume in the air, this triggers thoughts about how perfume is dispersed:

Wait. Hm. Hm. Yes. That’s her perfume. Why she waved her hand. I leave you this to think of me when I’m far away on the pillow. What is it? Heliotrope? No. Hyacinth? Hm. Roses, I think. She’d like scent of that kind. Sweet and cheap: soon sour. Why Molly likes opoponax. Suits her, with a little jessamine mixed. Her high notes and her low notes. At the dance night she met him, dance of the hours. Heat brought it out. (Joyce, 1922, [2017])

Repetition

Repetition is often used in stream of consciousness to reflect characters’ rumination or obsession with a thought, memory, or idea. In Faulkner’s Southern Gothic novel As I Lay Dying (1930), we can see the use of repetition in the thoughts of seventeen-year-old Dewey Dell as she reflects upon the recent death of her mother:

I heard that my mother is dead. I wish I had time to let her die. I wish I had time to wish I had. It is because in the wild and outraged earth too soon too soon too soon. It’s not that I wouldn’t and will not it’s that it is too soon too soon too soon. (2024)

The repetition here of “I wish” indicates Dewey Dell’s guilt over having insufficiently mourned her mother as she was preoccupied with her own problems (i.e., her unplanned pregnancy) at her mother’s deathbed. Repeated words and phrases can, as we see here, indicate an obsessive or preoccupation with a thought, idea, or feeling (in this case regret and guilt). Ruminating on how the death was “too soon” adds an element of denial to Dewey Dell’s grief.

Examples in modernist literature

Dorothy Richardson, Pilgrimage: Pointed Roofs

As previously mentioned, the first use of the term “stream of consciousness” by a critic was in reference to Richardson’s thirteen-part novel Pilgrimage:

Richardson's claim to be recognized as a key modernist figure lies principally in her avant-garde stylistic innovations, most notably her pioneering use of what May Sinclair first termed "stream-of-consciousness," pre-dating the more renowned achievements of Joyce and Woolf. (Ruth McElroy, “Richardson, Dorothy (1873- 1957),” Encyclopedia of Literary Modernism, 2003)

Richardson however, was not keen on the term in reference to her work, calling it a “lamentably ill-chosen metaphor” (“Novels,” Life and Letters To-day, 1948)

We can see an example of Richardson’s technique in the first work in the Pilgrimage series, Pointed Roofs (1915) in which the protagonist Miriam travels to Germany to teach English at a finishing school and hears student Emma Bergmann play the piano:

Miriam, her fatigue forgotten, slid to a featureless freedom. It seemed to her that the light with which the room was filled grew brighter and clearer. She felt that she was looking at nothing and yet was aware of the whole room like a picture in a dream. Fear left her. The human forms all round her lost their power. They grew suffused and dim.... The pensive swing of the music changed to urgency and emphasis.... It came nearer and nearer. It did not come from the candle-lit corner where the piano was.... It came from everywhere. It carried her out of the house, out of the world.
It hastened with her, on and on towards great brightness.... Everything was growing brighter and brighter....

Gertrude Goldring, the Australian, was making noises with her hands like inflated paper bags being popped. ([2002])

Joyce Kelley describes the scene as “one of the most important modernist moments of the novel,” (Excursions into Modernism, 2017) and points to Caesar R Blake’s comments in the Spectator in which he described the scene as “‘opening’ vouchsafed to the contemplative consciousness” (1919; Quoted in Kelley, 2017).

As Kelley elaborates,

Such an “opening” may remind us of Richardson’s feeling in writing the novel, when she felt in tune with her unconscious. [...] Suddenly the music creates a new geographic space for Miriam’s wandering mind as the room itself becomes “like a picture in a dream.” [...] Music takes Miriam on a mental excursion to a new plane of existence, a space of “great brightness,” until there is an interruption of strange popping noises, which Miriam in her transformed state cannot recognize as applause. (2017)

It is through the dreamlike nature of stream of consciousness that the reader can step into the mind of Miriam, experiencing her wandering thoughts and memories.

James Joyce, Ulysses

Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) is a modern take on Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey. In Joyce’s text, set in a single day in Dublin, we are privy to the internal thoughts of three main characters: Leopold Bloom, his wife Molly, and Stephen Dedalus (a character from Joyce’s previous novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 1916).

The stream-of-consciousness passages for each character, of course, have different focuses. While Stephen Dedalus’ thoughts are predominantly introspective and concerned with philosophical and existential questions, Leopold’s thoughts are often personal and border on the mundane as he observes the world around him. An example of Leopold’s stream of consciousness is as follows:

The sun was nearing the steeple of George’s church. Be a warm day I fancy. Specially in these black clothes feel it more. Black conducts, reflects, (refracts is it?), the heat. But I couldn’t go in that light suit. Make a picnic of it. His eyelids sank quietly often as he walked in happy warmth. Boland’s breadvan delivering with trays our daily but she prefers yesterday’s loaves turnovers crisp crowns hot. Makes you feel young. (Joyce, 1922, [2017])

As Laura Winkiel explains,

Sentences are fragmented; words are truncated. As we eavesdrop on Bloom’s inner thoughts, we don’t get perfectly polished sentences because we are seemingly not the intended audience. Bloom is talking to himself: a highly informal, even intimate, act. (Modernism, 2017)

One of the most celebrated sections of the novel is the final episode “Penelope”, where we experience the uninterrupted thoughts of Molly Bloom, told in only eight, unpunctuated sentences. Molly lies in bed contemplating her past lovers, infidelity, and memories with her husband, as well as her thoughts on ageing and social norms. As Molly recalls accepting Leopold’s proposal, she closes the novel with the famous words “yes I said yes I will Yes” (Joyce, 1922, [2017]) - Joyce wanted the novel to end on the most positive word in the English language.

As Arnold Kettle writes,

Here, with the abandonment of punctuation, there seems to be a more consistent attempt actually to reproduce the stream of consciousness. The thoughts are now no longer broken by objective statements in the third person, they glide on and into each other until consciousness is finally overcome by sleep. [...] Molly Bloom's thoughts need no punctuation because, lying in bed, action has been eliminated. The cross-play of thought and action is no longer a technical problem. It is significant that the stream of consciousness method can only come into play in its purest form when consciousness is no longer an active apprehension of the present but a mode of recollection and impulse divorced from actual activity. (An Introduction to the English Novel: Volume 2, 1953, [2016])

Using stream of consciousness is a hallmark of Joyce’s work, with his novel Finnegan’s Wake (1939), regarded by many as one of the most challenging books in the literature, taking stream of consciousness to another level.

Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway

Virginia Woolf is regarded as one of the masters of the technique:

Virginia Woolf’s fictional experimentation pushes the boundaries of form. She makes use of interior monologue, fragmentation, irony, and dislocations of time. She raises epistemological questions in her novels about the mind and perspective. Woolf’s lyricism unwinds in passages of “Time Passes” in To the Lighthouse and in the interludes of The Waves. Her language takes flight in other stories with fluid, poetic phrasing, and stream of consciousness. (Robert McParland, ​​Cultural Memory, Consciousness, and The Modernist Novel, 2022)

A key example of how Woolf uses stream of consciousness can be seen in her novel Mrs Dalloway (1925) which, similar to Ulysses, follows the thoughts and experiences of the titular Clarissa Dalloway during a single day in London. In the extract below, Clarissa contemplates her relationship with the city:

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. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. Such fools we are, she thought, crossing Victoria Street. (Woolf, 1925, [2019])

Woolf’s unconventional use of punctuation indicates interruptions in her thoughts and transitions between ideas, capturing the dynamic nature of consciousness.

Examples in contemporary fiction

Though some of the most famous and influential examples of stream of consciousness are found in modernist literature, there are countless instances of this style in contemporary fiction, specifically Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) and the work of Max Porter.

Toni Morrison, Beloved

Toni Morrison’s much-celebrated novel Beloved (1987) is a haunting novel set in the aftermath of the American Civil War. In the novel, Sethe, a former enslaved woman, is haunted by her dead daughter (known as Beloved), and explores themes of trauma, memory, and the legacy of slavery. The following excerpt demonstrates how Morrison uses stream of consciousness to mimic the innermost thoughts of the character Beloved:

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 doing it at last a hot thing now we can join a hot thing (1987, [2024])

The repeated use of the phrase “I am not dead” acts as a form of incantation as the spirit of Beloved tries to will herself back to life:

In what is the most surrealistic event in the novel, Beloved speaks, not just for herself, but as a representative of the 60 million Africans taken from their homeland who died in the middle passage. To mark its importance, Morrison suspends formal grammatical requirements, opting instead for short staccato-like sentences with very little punctuation of capitalization. [...] the style of the prose is stream-of-consciousness. We are finally inside Beloved’s head. (Intelligent Education, Study Guide to Beloved by Toni Morrison, 2020)

Max Porter

Another contemporary writer who utilizes this technique is Max Porter, writer of Grief is the Thing with Feathers (2015), Lanny (2019), The Death of Francis Bacon (2021), and Shy (2023).

In Shy, Porter narrates the journey of a teenager, the eponymous Shy, over the course of one evening as he runs away from a juvenile reform home, Last Chance. Shy’s thoughts oscillate between his current situation and surroundings and his past, often broken up with his opinions on the music he listens to on his Walkman:

Its idiom is noticeably different from that of Porter’s former novels because it contains a lot of teen slang, the kind used by the teenage focalizer and his mates. There is a great formal variety between sections (all of which are unnumbered and untitled): some are composed of several-page-long paragraphs; others are highly fragmented and contain a lot of blank space. (Wojciech Drąg, “The Rise and Rise of Max Porter,” Critical Perspectives on Max Porter, 2024)

Stream of consciousness is used to achieve a different effect altogether in Lanny, creating a dreamlike narrative in this rural folktale. The story follows a couple who have just moved to a village in England from the city with their son, the imaginative and sensitive Lanny. This close-knit and seemingly uneventful village is thrown into turmoil when Lanny goes missing, lured away by the supernatural being Dead Papa Toothwart.

Throughout the text, the reader is privy to the thoughts of many characters including Lanny’s parents, family friend and reclusive artist “Mad” Peter, various villagers, and Dead Papa Toothwart. Though these are the primary perspectives in the text, we also hear from numerous other villagers as they interrupt the narrative with their own dialogue and thoughts, adding a sense of disorientation and chaos. The range of narrative voices and intrusions reveals the deeply interconnected (and often contentious) nature of rural living.

Concluding thoughts

Though most prominently expressed in modernist literature, stream of consciousness continues to be used in contemporary fiction, such as Milkman (2018) by Anna Burns and Duck, Newburyport (2019) by Lucy Ellman. By reflecting the chaotic, unfiltered experience of human thought, these texts offer their readers a more intimate connection with the characters.

The significance of the technique in creating an immersive reading experience is best explained by Virginia Woolf in her essay “Modern Fiction” (1925):

Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness. 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. (Essays, 2021)

Further reading on Perlego

Modernist Fiction: An Introduction (2014) by Randall Stevenson

Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction (2020) by Dorrit Claire Cohn

Virginia Woolf and the Madness of Language (2018) by Daniel Ferrer

Bibliography

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https://www.faber.co.uk/product/9780571338757-milkman/

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https://www.perlego.com/book/4330632/critical-perspectives-on-max-porter

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​https://www.perlego.com/book/3277503/the-waste-land-prufrock-the-hollow-men-and-other-poems

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