Stream-of-Consciousness
In Handbook to Literature, Eighth Edition, ed. William Harmon and C. Hugh Holman, the stream of consciousness novel is defined as a novel that takes as its subject "the flow of the stream of consciousness of one or more of its characters."
It uses various techniques and is related to developments of the psychological novel prior to Woolf and Joyce's time. I will provide my own "take" on the stream-of-consciousness technique here.Its forerunner was the psychological novel as exemplified by Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, which had an enormous influence on many such novelists. Another forerunner was Henry James, who created what he called a "central consciousness" or a governing intelligence, a character that he would stay with throughout a story or novel and whose mind we would thus be limited to in our perception of the action of the novel. The subject of these novels often was precisely the inner thoughts and emotions of the character rather than any external events. Long passages would be devoted to the rendition of these inner states of mind, such as in the famous fireside scene in James's Portrait of A Lady wherein Isabel must consider her choices. The term "stream of consciousness" was first used by William James, Henry's brother, the founder of pragmatism. He did not use it to describe novels but the workings of the mind.
This shift in emphasis to the inner lives of characters during the late Victorian period and in the modern period has often been said to be related to a growing shift away from a belief in an independent, absolutely verifiable external reality. The breakdown of religious faith after Darwin and in certain forms of scientific certainty after Heisenberg, Einstein, et al. also paralleled these gradual shifts of emphasis in the arts. A loss of confidence in absolutes, in political authority, scientific authority, religious authority, or indeed even the authority of a unified subject or identity (with the rise of psychology during the 1920s) all can be related to some extent to the shifting practices and innovations in artistic and literary form.
Quite a few novels used interior monologue or the free indirect style in their rendition of a central character's perceptions of the world and inner thoughts in response.
The difference in stream-of-consciousness is that the attempt here is to render the thoughts "as they fall" upon the mind (see Woolf's "Modern Fiction"). These thoughts as they fall, in random, free, unstructured, chaotic, and even inchoate or nonverbal form--these are the purest fragments or moments of sensation and being. The novelist using stream-of-consciousness seeks to create the illusion that we are overhearing the flood of sensations and uncensored, pre-rational thoughts within a character's mind before the character has ordered them into any coherent form or shape. Thus the novelist will dispense with grammar, with logic, with neat, orderly sentences and predictable pauses. Joyce lets Molly Bloom run on for one extended sentence of 64 pages in Ulysses. Woolf refers to this aspect of stream of consciousness when she talks to the reader in "Character and Fiction" and says that "in the course of your daily life this past week you have had far stranger and more interesting experiences than the one I have tried to describe. You have overheard scraps of talk that filled you with amazement. You have gone to bed at night bewildered by the complexity of your feelings. In one day thousands of ideas have coursed through your brains; thousands of emotions have met, collided, and disappeared in astonishing disorder." I say "illusion" because the novelist of course does shape this collection of thoughts into the appearance of shapelessness. Woolf in her novels tries to suggest this flood of the daily internal experiences of any ordinary person, an experience wherein "thousands of ideas have coursed through your brains; thousands of emotions have met, collided, and disappeared in astonishing disorder. " Stream of consciousness is the rendition of the astonishing disorder of our minds. I would argue that perception itself becomes the focus of these novels. See also Woolf's essay "Modern Fiction" which we discussed in class.
Other novelists besides Joyce and Woolf who are known for being relatively early innovators in the development of stream-of-consciousness narrative: Dorothy Richardson, William Faulkner; Thomas Wolfe. Many others have also worked with the technique. Many writers have also alluded to Virginia Woolf in their novels. See the Writers on Woolf page.
from http://acweb.colum.edu/departments/english/eng2/woolf/stream.html