Thursday, September 25, 2014
Character Development in Mrs. Dalloway
In Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf has a unique way of developing characters. She presents the reader with the opinions and memories of her characters which reveal details of their lives. Normally, an author would present the circumstances of a character's life to explain their thoughts and emotions, but Woolf reverses this process. The reason she is able to do this is the stream of conscious narration, and the narration constantly switching between each character's minds. This gives acces to their thought process, but, unfortunately, no clarification for why they are thinking certain things, requiring the reader the reflect more deeply on the characters to understand the. While this style can be confusing and unclear, it provides a unique and powerful way to understand characters.
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Good observation, buddy. After reading your post, I reread a couple pages/chapters and began to detect parts where she presents the reader with opinions and memories. I did not fully pick up on how precisely she focused on developing her characters throughout Mrs. Dalloway, but after going back into the book, I think it is indeed a unique way for the reader to better understand the characters. The fact that she shifts from one character's stream of consciousness to another, it made it a bit more difficult for me to fully understand the characters, as, like you said, we enter the characters subjective interior thoughts. It essentially disallows one to comprehend the reason behind their thought process, but at the same time Woolf forces the reader to understand the characters in a different, non-cliche way.
ReplyDeleteTo be perfectly honest at times I get completely lost trying to comprehend Woolf's use of stream of consciousness. There is so much going on inside a person's mind and she strives to capture and display every bit of it. There are plenty of times where I have read a paragraph or a page and then realized that I had no clue what I was reading. Only after rereading the passages and taking time to attempt to understand certain characteristics of people and events was I able to understand what was going on at that time. But, even though there are moments where events and details within her stream of consciousness completely fly over my head, the writing itself is extremely captivating for it truly emulates the randomness and fluidity of the mind.
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