The concept of moments of being = Virginia Woolf

Paralysis = James Joyce

Virginia Woolf had the opportunity to come in contact with the writers of her times.

She experiments in art, she rejected the standards of novelist she considers materialist (Arnold Bennett and John Galsworthy) because she wanted to focus the attention on the subjectivity of the character on the consciousness. She thought that only subjectivity and consciousness could convey of truth of human experience: the truth of life. In order to reach her aim she tried hard to create novels that rendered the flow of consciousness is stream that explains for the rhythm of her prose and the use of language of poetry. Flashback and flash-forward are the means from which she conveys the inner life of the characters because this is the way mind works. She adopted and she was a skilled exopent of the stream of consciousness technique gives true free indirect style, the eclipse of the narrator and the shift of point of view and interior monologue.

Her idea of life is well expressed in her essay The Common Reader (1925) where she invites the readers to look within and to look her life. Here she wants the reader to examine what happens in a mind, an ordinary mind on an ordinary day (the life on Monday and Tuesday). She explains that the mind receives impressions of a different nature (trivial or banal but also very important). Such impressions are incessant and they create the shape of the day.

Since it is such impressions that make up people’s ordinary life it is such impressions that the writer has to convey to the reader. It follows that “no comedy, no plot….”.

According to Virginia Woolf’s thought therefore, life cannot be return to the reader in a series on, “gig-lamp symmetrical arranged v.34”.

Virginia Woolf concluded the essay highlighted the concept of the novelist’s task is to convey the unknown spirit of one consciousness.

Moment of being. Virginia Woolf is recognized as one of the great innovators of Modern fiction. Her experiments with points of view have influenced many writers that followed her. But one particulary interesting technique that doesn’t seem to reach much attention is her use of “moments of being”.

To wonder why some moments are so powerful or memorable – even if the events themselves are unimportant – that they can be vividly recall while other are easily forgotten. She concludes that there are two kinds of experience:

a. moments of being

b. moments of non-being.

Moments of non-being appear to be moments that the individual is not consciously aware even as she or he experiences them.

Virginia Woolf notes that people perform routine tasks such as walking and shopping without thinking about them. This part of the life is not lived consciously, but instead is embodied in  “a kind of no descript cotton wool”.

It is not the nature of actions that separate moments of being from moments of no-being. One activity is not intrinsically more mundane or more extraordinary than others, instead, it is the intensity of feeling, unconsciousness of the experience, that separate the two moments.