What Is Stream of Consciousness? | Definition & Examples

Stream of consciousness emerged from modernist literature in the early 1920s after World War I. Its main aim is to achieve verisimilitude (or believability) in terms of reproducing how human beings actually think. So what is it exactly? 

Stream of consciousness is a narrative technique in nondramatic fiction that seeks to faithfully reflect how the human mind operates in writing.  As such, it records the nonlinear pattern in which we think by including things such as free association, multiple sensory observations, cycles of repetition, and conversational nonformal syntax. 

The pioneers of stream of consciousness are modernist writers, including Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and William Faulkner. We will look at examples of stream of consciousness from James Joyce’s famous prose poem, Ulysses (1922). The following is from what may well be the most famous and most virtuoso example of stream of consciousness in the history of literature. It is part of a paragraph that is made up of one sentence that is approximately 4300 words long:

and the night we missed the boat at Algeciras the watchman going about serene with his lamp and O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the fig trees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

This passage is taken from the last page of Ulysses. It is quite a famous piece of purple prose and describes the thinking and memories of Molly Bloom, the wife of one of the main characters, Leopold Bloom, as he sleeps next to her. The passage can be described as a type of dramatic monologue, which we can call an interior monologue. She is remembering when she was proposed to by her husband.

We see the word “yes” being repeated over and over again in what can be called a looped repetition. The passage includes no punctuation, except for the word “yes” itself. We know for sure that Molly said yes to the proposal, obviously, but the repetition of the word successfully recreates the enthusiasm, excitement, and romance of the moment. 

1934 portrait of Joyce, by Jacques-Émile Blanche.

A closer look at stream of consciousness in Ulysses

The repetition of the word “yes” as a punctuation mark is only a small part of this very experimental passage and form of writing. Ulysses is a prose poem, which is a kind of free verse form. Free verse is defined as poetry that is concerned with reproducing the cadences of human speech, and this is what Joyce aims for in this passage. 

Molly is an actress and has a flair for melodrama. Just think of the passage as her expressing the excitement of the event to one of her female friends. Joyce writes in a way to capture Molly's entire personality as expressed through her manner of thinking. We get a flood of associations in a rhythm infused with the happiness, excitement, and bubbly personality of a woman who was just proposed to by a man she loves in a romantic setting. It is, in short, the happiest moment of her life. This sense of rhythmic excitement is emphasized by the employment of polysyndeton, that is, the overuse of the conjunction "and."

On the page, the passage comes across as a messy and undifferentiated blob of words. It even looks worse in the book. The chapter from which the passage is taken is written in a handful of lengthy paragraphs, absent of anything remotely resembling conventional punctuation. However, Joyce has poured effort into crafting this passage and giving it a certain structure.

There are three movements in the passage, which I have colored accordingly. They each begin with “and” and end in “yes.” In the first movement, we have a string of associations, including “the boat at Algeciras,” the watchman with a lamp, the torrential rain, the sea, sunset, and fig trees in the Alameda gardens. The second movement includes associations relating to the charming streets and houses of the city, and the rose garden, ending with Molly sticking the rose in her hair. The last movement refers to the actual proposal and the two lovers kissing. 

The passage you can say is unified by the association with flowers, with Molly describing herself as a “Flower of the mountain.” She and her husband are, after all, named Bloom. We see the reference to flowers being teased in reference to the Alameda Gardens in the first movement, followed by Molly describing herself as a mountain flower in the second movement, and her husband-to-be referring to her as “my mountain flower.” 

The passage is part of a wider movement in the last paragraph of the chapter, where Molly thinks about wearing roses earlier. Think of it as a kind of culmination, where Molly, who is cheating on her husband, nevertheless, affirms the love she has for him with the most positive word in the English language — “Yes.” 

Stream of consciousness in Virginia Woolf

James Joyce and Virginia Woolf were contemporaries. Woolf came up with her own take on stream of consciousness. She experimented with the literary device in a number of novels, including "To the Lighthouse" (published in 1927):

But what have I done with my life? thought Mrs. Ramsay, taking her place at the head of the table, and looking at all the plates making white circles on it. “William, sit by me,” she said. “Lily,” she said, wearily, “over there.” They had that⁠—Paul Rayley and Minta Doyle⁠—she, only this⁠—an infinitely long table and plates and knives. At the far end, was her husband, sitting down, all in a heap, frowning. What at? She did not know. She did not mind. She could not understand how she had ever felt any emotion or any affection for him. She had a sense of being past everything, through everything, out of everything, as she helped the soup, as if there was an eddy⁠—there⁠—and one could be in it, or one could be out of it, and she was out of it. It’s all come to an end, she thought, while they came in one after another, Charles Tansley⁠—“Sit there, please,” she said⁠—Augustus Carmichael⁠—and sat down. And meanwhile she waited, passively, for someone to answer her, for something to happen. But this is not a thing, she thought, ladling out soup, that one says.

The passage gives a description of Mrs. Ramsay's thinking at a dinner table. She is contemplating her life choices and decisions in terms of the role she plays in her family. Unlike James Joyce, Woolf uses conventional punctuation (such as the em dash) to properly dramatize Mrs. Ramsay's internal monologue. The stream of her consciousness is timed with the events taking place in real time.

We can see this in the sentence: "It’s all come to an end, she thought, while they came in one after another, Charles Tansley⁠—“Sit there, please,” she said⁠—Augustus Carmichael⁠—and sat down." We see her taking a mental note of the guests taking their places at the table, with the names of the guests and her polite conversations or instructions to them interrupting the flow of the sentence.

The sentence really should have been "It’s all come to an end, she thought, while they came in one after another and sat down." The em dashes are used to incorporate the people and things that interrupt her thinking, resulting in a strange kind of anastrophe or inverted sentence structure. Woolf uses this technique to replicate the disjointed and dynamic manner in which humans actually think.

The very first sentence is full of irony. It begins with the question "But what have I done with my life?" and ends with what seems to be an answer to that question with the phrase "taking her place at the head of the table." Mrs. Ramsay is the matriarch of the family. She holds things together, even trivialities such as conducting dinner conversations. She resents it and is beginning to think that her entire life is a bad decision.

She compares herself with those of others that she is presumably envious of, Paul Ralye and Minta Doyle, and her own life seems little more than "an infinitely long table and plates and knives." It's boring, with no sense of romance, only tiresome housewifely duties and responsibilities. She feels alienated from her family, even her own husband.

Woolf does a remarkable job of navigating between Mrs. Ramsay's thinking to herself and the polite conversation she has with everyone. Internally, she feels depressed about her life choices and even regretful and resentful. But outwardly, she plays the part of the polite matron. But not so well at the moment, and she knows it. She is in the process of dissociating completely from everything and everybody. This is aptly described as "a sense of being past everything."

Two things are achieved simultaneously in the passage. Wolf captures the verisimilitude of expressing how human consciousness operates. In addition, she provides a feminist perspective through the eyes of a woman who has had to suppress her selfhood to the point of near self-annihilation to play a sterile and oppressive role as a matron and a housewife.

More than anything else, the passage aptly demonstrates how far a person's internal world can differ from the external world in which they engage. The distance for Mrs. Ramsay is so wide that she almost completely dissociates. At the end of the passage, she is even thinking of asking out loud the question that the passage begins with, "But what have I done with my life?" But thinks the better of it as "this is not a thing . . . one says."

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Cite this EminentEdit article

Antoine, M. (2025, July 13). What Is Stream of Consciousness? | Definition & Examples. EminentEdit. https://www.eminentediting.com/post/stream-of-consciousness