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3.72 AVERAGE
3.72 AVERAGE
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
While I can recognise that this book is artfully written and the prose are incredible, I struggled to enjoy it. Much of the narrative was disjointed in my mind and it was hard to follow what was happening at times. Recommend for the art of it, but perhaps not the enjoyment.
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
N/A
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
challenging
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
reflective
slow-paced
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
In reading Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, I felt as if I had plunged into a summer day in London, the currents of time taking me in an out of the minds of the ensemble of characters. Woolf masterfully weaves the inner voices of each character, each of them thinking in a distinctive rhythm – Clarissa’s mercurial, unfiltered, Richard’s, slower, tentative, Peter’s, critical, self-conscious. Clarissa, the middle-aged protagonist, prepares for her party. She is often reminded of the past and recognizes her inability to discern whether her past life choices were good or bad. She is also conflicted by her desire for privacy and her desire for communication with others; she understands that because of these conflicts, surviving each day is surviving a type of danger.
In contrast, Septimus, the young soldier, is no longer able to find the strength to face others or himself – his suicide a last attempt to communicate his intense lack of feeling. (“Besides, now that he was quite alone, condemned, deserted, as those who are about to die are alone, there was a luxury in it, an isolation full of sublimity; a freedom which the attached can never know.” Later, Clarissa will feel a kind of admiration mixed with a responsibility for his death.)
The aging adults feel the most because they look back, obsess over memories long gone. “When one was young, said Peter, one was too much excited to know people. Now that one was old….now that one was mature than…one could watch, one could understand, and one did not lose the power of feeling…” The characters in Mrs. Dalloway represent disparate representations of their society, its pressures, and its decaying and flourishing features, which mold, crush, accept, or abandon its inhabitants.
In contrast, Septimus, the young soldier, is no longer able to find the strength to face others or himself – his suicide a last attempt to communicate his intense lack of feeling. (“Besides, now that he was quite alone, condemned, deserted, as those who are about to die are alone, there was a luxury in it, an isolation full of sublimity; a freedom which the attached can never know.” Later, Clarissa will feel a kind of admiration mixed with a responsibility for his death.)
The aging adults feel the most because they look back, obsess over memories long gone. “When one was young, said Peter, one was too much excited to know people. Now that one was old….now that one was mature than…one could watch, one could understand, and one did not lose the power of feeling…” The characters in Mrs. Dalloway represent disparate representations of their society, its pressures, and its decaying and flourishing features, which mold, crush, accept, or abandon its inhabitants.
I was looking forward to finally reading a work by the very well-known author, Virginia Woolf, but to be honest, this book was a huge letdown. The story follows the day of a very egotistical housewife, Clarissa Dalloway, and the planning for her party that will take place that evening. With the context being changed every sentence, it is very hard to keep track of what is going on and who is who.
This novel was very tedious and I found it difficult to struggle through to the end without throwing it at a wall. The only thing that pushed me to finish it, was that it was for my extension english class, as one of the focus texts.
This novel was very tedious and I found it difficult to struggle through to the end without throwing it at a wall. The only thing that pushed me to finish it, was that it was for my extension english class, as one of the focus texts.
hopeful
lighthearted
reflective
emotional
reflective
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
dark
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
This is truly a novel for the era of Einstein and Heisenberg. No one but Woolf depicts with such arresting precision the internal experience of time and consciousness. Time is always the present as an envelope containing memory, which, in its vividness, is nearly indistinguishable from the sensible world, and consciousness glides without hitch or pause from sensory impressions to reflections to memories and back: "I haven't felt so young for years! thought Peter, escaping (only of course for an hour or so) from being precisely what he was, and feeling like a child who runs out of doors, and sees, as he runs, his old nurse waving at the wrong window. But she's extraordinarily attractive, he thought, as walking across Trafalgar Square in the direction of the Haymarket, came a young woman who, as she passed Gordon's statue, seemed, Peter Walsh thought (susceptible as he was), to shed veil after veil, until she became the very woman he had always had in mind . . . ." (51). The narrative voice slides as well from one consciousness to another, as if the world at any moment were a mosaic-whole of all consciousnesses and the narrator were a beam of light playing across it, barely resting on some individual tiles, lingering on others. Nothing much happens in the novel, yet all of life is present; the closest thing to a suspenseful plot belongs to Septimus Warren Smith, a character whose life is almost entirely tangential to Clarissa Dalloway's, yet intersects hers in a way known to her and in other ways she cannot know. This novel will frustrate anyone who wishes to read for the pleasures of plot, for the illusion of containment and resolution that many novels provide; it's a novel of the immensity and triviality that a day--not even a 24-hour period, only the waking day--can contain. Everything is partial, unresolved.