Stream of consciousness writing

Stream of consciousness is a term used in literary criticism for a literary technique that reports the thought processes of a person. 

If it is done in context with the surrounding world it is called interior or internal monologue. That means it is unspoken, and in some cases could not be spoken. For example, in Mikhail Bulgakov's Heart of a Dog (1925) the first chapter is entirely based on the dog's unspoken thoughts on the world about him.Bulgakov, Mikhail [1925] 1968. Heart of a Dog. NY: Picador & London Pan Books.

Stream-of-consciousness writing is typical for the modernist movement. The term was coined by William James in 1890 in his  Principles of Psychology. The use of the term in literature is attributed to May Sinclair. 

Several famous works that employ stream of consciousness are:
 Édouard Dujardin's Les Lauriers sont coupés (1888)
 Arthur Schnitzler's Leutnant Gustl (1901)
 Nadine Gordimer's July's People
 Shikibu's The Tale of Genji
 Lewis Grassic Gibbon's Sunset Song.
 Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage (1915-67)
 James Joyce's Ulysses (in particular Molly Bloom's Soliloquy), as well as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Finnegans Wake
 Samuel Beckett's Trilogy
 Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and The Waves
 William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying
 T.S. Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
 Jack Kerouac’s On the Road
J.D. Salinger Seymour: An Introduction
Sam Selvon's The Lonely Londonders
Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time
William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch

 References 

Category:Literature