Which literary technique presents the thoughts and feelings of a character as they occur?

The correct answer highlights a literary technique that captures a character's inner thoughts and feelings in a flowing, often unstructured manner. This technique is known as stream of consciousness. It aims to portray an ongoing flow of thoughts that go through a character's mind, often including sensory experiences and emotions, without conforming to traditional narrative structure.

Stream of consciousness is effective in giving readers an intimate glimpse into a character's psyche, allowing them to experience the characters' thoughts in a raw, immediate way. This technique is often associated with modernist writers like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, who utilized it to delve deep into the complexities of human consciousness.

Other choices, while related to character representation, do not specifically capture the continuous thought process. For instance, a flashback refers to a narrative technique that interrupts the chronological flow of a story to revisit past events. Dialogue involves the spoken exchanges between characters, contributing to character development and plot advancement but does not explore internal thoughts explicitly. An interior monologue presents a character's thoughts directly, but it is typically more structured than stream of consciousness, often resembling a more coherent and organized expression of thought.