Interior Monologue

recording of T.S. Eliot reading his “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

interior monologue, in dramatic and nondramatic fiction, narrative technique that exhibits the thoughts passing through the minds of the protagonists. These ideas may be either loosely related impressions approaching free association or more rationally structured sequences of thought and emotion.

Interior monologues encompass several forms, including dramatized inner conflicts, self-analysis, imagined dialogue (as in T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” [1915]), and rationalization. It may be a direct first-person expression apparently devoid of the author’s selection and control, as in Molly Bloom’s monologue concluding James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), or a third-person treatment that begins with a phrase such as “he thought” or “his thoughts turned to.”

The term interior monologue is often used interchangeably with stream of consciousness. But while an interior monologue may mirror all the half thoughts, impressions, and associations that impinge upon the character’s consciousness, it may also be restricted to an organized presentation of that character’s rational thoughts. Closely related to the soliloquy and dramatic monologue, the interior monologue was first used extensively by Édouard Dujardin in Les Lauriers sont coupés (1887; We’ll to the Woods No More) and later became a characteristic device of 20th-century psychological novels.