4.B Stream of Consciousness (NAR-1.L)

A mind does not compose paragraphs. It notices a chair, which calls up Thursday, which calls up rain, which calls up a mother's voice from years ago. Nothing hands you a topic sentence first. Stream of consciousness tries to put that raw sequence on the page, so punctuation drops away, sentences run into each other, and the order of items is governed by what each item reminds the mind of, not by when things happened or by any rule of grammar.

This is why stream of consciousness is not the same as a character 'thinking' inside an ordinary paragraph. 'She wondered if she had been fair to him, and decided she had not' is a narrator standing outside the mind, reporting its conclusion in tidy syntax. Stream of consciousness skips the reporter. It gives you the letters, the unanswered count, the stamp cost, the guilt, all fused into one unbroken movement, because that is the order a mind actually produces them in, not the order a summary would choose.

The technique changes what counts as an event. Locked inside one consciousness for pages, a narrative cannot easily show action from outside: a knock at the door becomes an interruption to a thought about someone's father, a letter sits unopened, a decision does not get announced so much as surface, twice, inside the flow. Plot does not stop. It just arrives as recognition instead of action, which is why stream of consciousness pairs naturally with narratives that trust interiority over event.