interiority

Interiority refers to the inner life of a conscious subject—the thoughts, feelings, beliefs, memories, and motivations that constitute personal subjectivity. It denotes the realm of mental phenomena that are not directly observable by others and thus require interpretation through behavior, speech, or textual representation. In philosophy and phenomenology, interiority is closely tied to questions about consciousness, selfhood, and the accessibility of inner experience, often in dialogue or tension with exteriority—the external world and others' perceptions.

In literature and narrative theory, interiority is a central concern of how writers reveal a character's inner life. Techniques such as free indirect discourse, stream of consciousness, and interior monologue render thoughts and feelings visible to the reader, sometimes preserving the limits of what the character can articulate, other times overwhelming the external action with inner drama.

Interiority also appears in psychology, where introspection and the study of mental states concern the inner life, and in religious or spiritual contexts, where interiority describes inward devotion, contemplation, or moral formation. Across disciplines, a common challenge is the epistemic and ethical question of how interior states are known, shared, or judged, given their private nature and partial accessibility to others.

Interiority thus sits at the intersection of phenomenology of experience and cultural representations of subjectivity.