Composition
Interior Monologue
The interior monologue is a device of psychological depiction that conveys the unspoken thoughts, feelings, and experiences of a character — his immediate inner speech addressed to himself. The interior monologue reveals the hidden movements of the soul, the struggle of motives, and secret desires and doubts, deepening the psychologism of the work. Unlike the stream of consciousness, the interior monologue is usually more logically ordered, closer to ordinary speech. This device is widely used by psychological prose and drama. For example, interior monologues reveal the complex spiritual state of the heroes in the prose of Valerian Pidmohylny and Volodymyr Vynnychenko, and in drama the hidden experiences of the characters. The masterful use of the interior monologue allows one to show a person 'from within', to make the reader a witness of the most intimate movements of consciousness, and thereby to achieve a deep psychological conviction of the depicted character.
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Compare “Interior Monologue” with another term
Meaning, origins and distinction — side by side.
Distinction
Two related techniques for depicting inner speech, differing in degree of ordering. Interior monologue is still COHERENT, grammatically formed, logically consecutive speech of the hero 'to themselves', mentally addressed and mostly rational. Stream of consciousness goes further — toward EXTREME spontaneity: it imitates the unordered flow of thoughts, impressions, memories and associations before their logical shaping, often without punctuation or syntax (Joyce). The first orders thought; the second reproduces its pre-syntactic chaos.
