Ella's 20th Century Blog

Intersubjectivity and the Meeting of Minds in Mrs. Dalloway           Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway offers a unique perspective on its many facets of developing character, but perhaps one of the most fascinating is the weaving of multiple consciousness throughout the book, and the even more remarkable picture of when these consciousnesses collide. I think a particularly key use of this technique was in the scene between Peter and Clarissa reuniting after years apart. As Peter Walsh walked into the house he began thinking, “She’s looking at me, he thought, a sudden embarrassment coming over him, though he had kissed her hands. Putting his hand into his pocket, he took out a large pocket knife and half opened the blade…‘How heavenly it is to see you again!’ she exclaimed. He had his knife out. That’s so like him, she thought,” (Woolf 39). On the surface level, this dialogue is already quite enjoyable to read and dissect. From a glance, a reader with no cont...

The goal of many literary works has often been to capture what it means exactly to be a living, breathing human. While most fall short, bound to the unspoken laws of convention and plot, The Mezzanine differs from these works by narrowing the majority of its focus to the pure, unfiltered human experience. The first way Baker does this, and the most crucial, is by having the entirety of his book cover a tiny, seemingly insignificant, interval in a perfectly normal day. By focusing the time frame of the book on such a small instance, the thoughts of Howie are magnified a hundredfold, just as thoughts of actual humans sometimes seem to be. Every thought is immediately given more significance; more time to breathe and expand to its full capacity. An example of this is Howie’s thoughts about shoelaces, in which he expresses his pleasure at having both shoelaces break within two days of each other: “Apparently my shoe-tying routine was so unvarying and robotic that over those hundreds of mo...