RRhetoric
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Narrative & Time

Stream of Consciousness

Prose imitating the raw flow of a mind — jumps of association, unfinished syntax, memory and sensation mixed together. The grammar loosens because the mind hasn't sorted itself into sentences yet.

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.

Drill its family — Narrative & Time

In the Reader — 1 excerpt

Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo...
— James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man · open the passage →

The rest of the family

In Medias Res Prolepsis Analepsis Foreshadowing Free Indirect Discourse Stichomythia