interior monologue

A passage of writing presenting a character's inner thoughts and emotions in a direct, sometimes disjointed or fragmentary manner.

Dramatic technique used by an actor to present a monologue of his or her character's thoughts. The monologue is done for the benefit of the audience and not for the other characters in a scene. The presentation can be in the form of a voice-over or as an actor's aside.

interior monologue, the written representation of a character's inner thoughts, impressions, and memories as if directly ‘overheard’ without the apparent intervention of a summarizing and selecting narrator. The term is often loosely used as a synonym for stream of consciousness. However, some confusion arises about the relationship between these two terms when critics distinguish them: some take ‘stream of consciousness’ as the larger category, embracing all representations of intermingled thoughts and perceptions, within which interior monologue is a special case of ‘direct’ presentation; others take interior monologue as the larger category, within which stream of consciousness is a special technique emphasizing continuous ‘flow’ by abandoning strict logic, syntax, and punctuation. The second of these alternatives permits us to apply the term ‘interior monologue’ to that large class of modern poems representing a character's unspoken thoughts and impressions, as distinct from the spoken thoughts imagined in the dramatic monologue: Browning's ‘Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister’ (1842) is an early example. More often, though, the term refers to prose passages employing stream‐of‐consciousness techniques: the most celebrated instance in English is the final chapter of James Joyce's Ulysses (1922). Joyce acknowledged Édouard Dujardin's novel Les Lauriers sont coupées (1888) as a precedent in the use of interior monologue. See also monologue.

A narrative technique in which action and external events are conveyed indirectly through a fictional character's mental soliloquy of thoughts and associations.