The first night that I spent reading (although, "attempting to read" seems to be a more appropriate description of my venture into Virginia Woolf) Mrs. Dalloway, I had a lot of trouble figuring out what was going on. The way that the narrative uses free indirect discourse with Clarissa made it hard for me to follow, then when it began flitting from person to person, it took me several readings of each paragraph to be sure of what was happening.
However, once I got more familiar with Woolf's writing style, I started to enjoy the various perspectives that melted together to form a complete picture of each scene. It actually reminds me a little of the household deer from the novel, Girl in Landscape, that I read last year in English. In that book, there were small creatures that ran all over the place and could be inhabited by different peoples' consciousnesses. The mental image that I began forming after connecting Girl in Landscape with Mrs. Dalloway was rather strange, although Woolf's narrative does seem to me a little like it could be the account of one of those quasi-invisible creatures running around London. Now, my analogy doesn't work perfectly because in Girl in Landscape, the creatures can't actually hear the thoughts of the people that they follow or observe. But, the quick transitions and the lack of censorship or privacy of thoughts and actions, feels very similar to me in the two different novels.
No comments:
Post a Comment