Virginia Woolf is recognized as one of the great innovators of modern fiction. Her experiments with point of view have influenced many writers that fold her. But one particular interesting technique that doesn't seem to receive much attention is her use of moment of being... to wonder why some moments are so powerful and memorial - even if the events themselves are unimportant - that they can't be vividly recorded while other events are easily forgotten. She concludes that there are two kinds of experiences: (moments of) being and not being.
Virginia Woolf never defines what she means by moments of being. Instead she provides examples of these moments of what she calls "not being".
Moments of not being appear to be moments that the individual is not consciously aware of even he/she experiences them.
She knows the people perform routine such as waking and shopping without thinking about them. This part of the life is not lived consciously but instead is embayed in "a kind of not described cotton wool". It is not the nature of the actions that separates moments of being from moment of not being.
One activity is not intrinsically mundane or more extraordinary than the others. Instead , it is the intensity of feeling, one's consciousness of experience that separates two moments.
A walk in the country can easily be hidden behind the cotton wool for one person, but for Virginia Woolf the experience is very vivid. Virginia Woolf asserts that these moments of being, these flashes of awareness, reveal a pattern hidden behind the cotton wool of daily life, and that "I mean all human being are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art, that we are part of the work of art" but the individual artist is not important in this work. Instead she says of all people, "we are the world, we are the music, we are the thing itself" that's for Woolf a moment of being is a moment when an individual is full unconscious of his experience, a moment when he is not only aware of himself but catches a glimpse of his connection to a larger part hidden behind the opaque surface of daily life. Unlike moments of non being, when the individual leaves and acts without awareness performing acts as he fall asleep, the moment of being opens up a hidden reality. Moments of being can be found throughout Virginia Woolf's fiction.
Mrs. Dalloway, To The Light House and Between The Acts unlike Joyce's epiphany, these moments do not lead to decisive revelations for her characters but they provide moments of energy and awareness that allow the character who experiences them to see like more clearly and more fully if only briefly; and some characters try to share the vision that they glebes making the work of art that is life visible to others.
Mrs. Dalloway presents the two characters who are most receipting to moment of being in all of Woolf's fiction: Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warrence. Clarissa experiences her moments of being while in the middle of what appear to be triviour acts indicating that it is not the action, but the awareness that seeks a moment of being, apart from other's experience. Throughout the day, Clarissa is particularly aware of these freads of connection between herself and her surrounding, all of Virginia Woolf's moments of being are marked by particularly vivid and power of language. Because these are moments of exact feeling, the language used to convey them must naturally be precise and evocative; the form and content must be in perfect symmetry. It is true that in a novel, long strategy of narrative can be clothed in mundane language: not every sign is equal valid or must carry an equal weight. But in her moments of being Virginia Woolf use a language that approaches poetry.