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Stream of Consciousness
Style
Explanation and Analysis:
Woolf utilizes a stream-of-consciousness writing style in "The Mark on the Wall," emphasizing the narrator's uncertainty and anxiety in the face of war atrocities and modernization. Many Modernist writers, including James Joyce, utilized this same writing style to more accurately embody the emotional tumult they and their contemporaries endured during and immediately after the first World War.
Woolf's narrator moves from thought to thought, uncertain about the mark's identity and unsettled by the transiency of human thought and moral impulse in general. The narrator moves quickly between these ideas:
How shocking, and yet how wonderful it was to discover that these real things, Sunday luncheons, Sunday walks, country houses, and tablecloths were not entirely real, were indeed half phantoms, and the damnation which visited the disbeliever in them was only a sense of illegitimate freedom. What now takes the place of those things I wonder, those real standard things? Men perhaps, should you be a woman; the masculine point of view which governs our lives.
The narrator goes from speculating about traditions, generalizations, and their unreality to speculating about women's rights (note: this period in time was crucial for the women's rights movement, for which Woolf was a strong advocate). This style suggests that the transiency of human thought and custom should also lead to the eclipse of patriarchal perspectives.
Related Themes:
