The text is an extract from the critical essay The Common Reader, (1925) by Virgina Woolf where she criticizes the way traditional novel was written.

The text can be divided into two parts.

The function of the first part is to explain what is missing in the traditional novels. The life presented in them is not like a life in our minds, but it is described from the birth to the death. The writer seems to be controlled "by some powerful and unscrupulus tyrant" who constrains him to write in certain way.

The function of the second part is to analyze how the life works, what the writers task is and how the novel should be written.She describes life as "a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us" created in the mind from "an incessant shower of innumerable atoms". There is a clear influence of Albert Einstein's theory of relativity. So, the task of the novelist is to convey the strange, unknown part of our consciousness.

The text is an argumentative text, so it presents the thesis to advance and the arguments with a clear logical structure.