pag 531,532

The common reader

•1)    What is missing in conventional novels?

In conventional novels, the thing more often misses, is the thing we seek.

We call it life or spirit, truth or reality, it refuses to be contained in such ill-fitting clothes as we provide.

•2)    How does Virginia Woolf describe life?

Virginia Woolf describes life as a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.

•3)    What does Woolf mean by "the life of Monday or Tuesday"?

Woolf is referring to the impressions an artist may receive for a moment in the mind in an ordinary day: these impressions can be trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel.

•4)    What is the task of the novelist and how should fiction be written?

The task of the novelist is to examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day to write a right novel. Woolf thinks the novelist could chose what she has to write, not what she must; if she could base his work upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style.

•5)    Can you see any similarity between Woolf's ideas about fiction and Monet's Impressionist painting?

There are some similarities: the new structural technique of Virginia Woolf introduces the interior monologue which shows ideas and feelings of the character. Moreover time has not a definite chronology.

In the same way Monet's painting shows how the artist saw "The Parliament" before painting it. In the picture time seems not to be defined.