Virginia Woolf spoke about moments of being and James Joyce spoke about the concept of paralysis and epiphany.

Virginia Woolf came naturally into the profession of writing and she had the opportunity to meet the most important readers of England.

Since she was a modernist and she wanted to experiment and rejected the cannons of the novelists she considered materialist like “Arnold Bennet and John Glasworthy” because she wanted to focus the attention on the subjectivity of their character on the consciousness. She thought that only subjectivity and consciousness could convey the truth of human experience “the truth of life”. In order to do this she tried hard to create novels that rendered the flow of the consciousness, its stream that explains for the rhythm of her prodes and the use of language reminding the language of poetry.

Flash-back and flash-forwards are the means through which she convey the inner lines of the character because this is the way the mind works.

She adopted and was skilled exponent of the stream of consciousness technique given through free indirect style, the eclipse of the narrator and the ship of the point of view and the last but not least the interior monologue.

The idea of life is well expressed in her “The Common Reader” (1925) were she invites the reader to look within and to look at life. Here she wants the reader to examine what happens in a mind, a ordinary mind, on a ordinary day (the life on Monday or Tuesday). She explains that the mind received impressions of a different nature (trivial or bawl but also very important). Such impressions are incessant and they create the shape of a 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 “there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy”. According to Virginia Woolf’s thought therefore “life cannot be returned to the reader in a series of gig-lamp or symmetrically arranged. Woolf concludes the essay highlighted the concept that the novelists 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 point of view have influenced many writers that followed her. But one particularly interesting technique that des not seem to reach much attention is her use of “moment of being”.

To wonders why some moments are also powerful and memorable - even if the events themselves  are unimportant- that they can be vividly recall why other events are easily forgotten. She concludes that there are two kinds (of moments experience):

A) Moment Of Being

B) Moment Of Not-Being

Moments of not-being appear to be moments that the individual is not consciously aware of even as she/he experiences them. Woolf knows that people’s performance routine task such as working and shopping without thinking about them. This part of the life is “not lived consciously” but instead is embody in “a kind of no-descript cotton wool”.

It is not the nature of the actions that separates moments of being from moments of not being. One activity is not intricacy more mundane or more extraordinary then the others. Instead, it is the intensity of feeling, ones consciousness of the experience, that separates the two moments.