Practice question · Select all that apply
Which are true of Mrs Dalloway’s narration?
Hints
- Three describe Woolf’s distinctive technique; one describes a different method entirely.
- The narration moves between minds, which a first-person narrator could not do.
Show the answer
- A. It covers a single day
- B. Consciousness passes between characters without announcement
- C. The day is held by a distributed awareness rather than one mind
Why
The transfer between minds is what distinguishes Woolf from Joyce here. A first-person narration could not do it, the awareness holding the day belongs to no single character, which is how the novel connects Clarissa to Septimus, two people who never meet.
Practise Ruptures: Proust, Joyce and Woolf
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More questions on Ruptures: Proust, Joyce and Woolf
- The disproportion between story time and discourse time in these novels is a technical flaw rather than a…
- Why is stream of consciousness better described as a representation than as a transcript?
- The Homeric parallel in Ulysses is described as a structural scaffold rather than a message. What follows…
- Match each writer to the technique most associated with them in this lesson.
- How many pages, approximately to the nearest fifty, does Ulysses take to narrate its single day?
- Complete the account of the two clocks.
- Woolf’s "Modern Fiction" argues that novelists should record an ordinary mind on an ordinary day.