Narrative & Time
Stream of Consciousness
Writing that represents a character’s flow of thoughts, sensations, and memories. Shifts of association and unfinished sentences can replace an orderly account.
Benjy's section of The Sound and the Fury.
Don't confuse it with Free Indirect Discourse. Free indirect discourse keeps the narrator's grammatical order while borrowing the character's voice; stream of consciousness lets the order itself dissolve.
Examples
Keys, where—coat pocket, no, the bus already, Mother’s blue coat, that winter smell, must not miss it again.
Associations, sensation, memory, and an unfinished intention run together instead of forming an orderly report.
The rest of the family
In Medias Res Prolepsis Analepsis Foreshadowing Free Indirect Discourse Stichomythia