Prose craft
Stream of consciousness
A narrative method that depicts the many thoughts and feelings passing through a character's mind, following their flow rather than ordered argument.
Stream of consciousness is the narrative method that attempts "to depict the multitudinous thoughts and feelings which pass through the mind" of a character. William James coined the phrase in The Principles of Psychology (1890), writing that consciousness "does not appear to itself as chopped up in bits ... it flows"; May Sinclair first applied it to fiction in 1918, and the modernists, Proust, Joyce, Dorothy Richardson and Woolf, developed it fully, followed by Faulkner and Beckett.
The useful distinction: stream of consciousness "is the subject matter, while interior monologue is the technique for presenting it," and the mode may violate "the norms of grammar, or logic," mingling thought with impression and perception. It is the far end of interiority from free indirect discourse; at length it taxes readers, so long works alternate it with conventional scenes. The choice belongs to point of view.