Learning Paths » 5B Interacting
The extract of Virginia Woolf's THE COMMON READER is about the way a novelist should write a novel.
The argumentation in the first paragraph is developed in a statement and expresses a Virginia Woolf's opinion. The first topic of the paragraph is the vagueness of criticism on novel writing. In Virginia's opinion the traditional way of writing fiction misses what life is really like.
The second statement of the paragraph is that the essential aspects, such as life, spirit, truth and reality, have moved off and refuse to be written in "ill-fitting vestments".
In addition, Virginia goes on saying that writers compose their novels with labour and unfortunately losing the visual in their minds. The tyrant totally controls the writer, but novels mustn't be written in a customary way.
The second paragraph is not developed in the same way as the first one, because there is only one statement and one of Virginia Woolf's opinion. She puts life and writing a novel into relationship and she says that the novel must be like life.
Life is made up of a myriad of impressions like an incessant shower of innumerable atoms. What the novelist is to convey is then the varying, unknown and uncircumscribed spirit. Consequently, in order to convey the true sense of existence, modern novelists tell the story exploring characters minds, through new innovative narrative techniques: the stream of consciousness, the shift of the point of view and the interior monologue. Furthermore, new novelists focus their attention on the psychological and subjective sphere, neglect objective and useless aspects of live and develop a more complex but more brief plot.