Prologue of “The hours”

The novel “The hours” starts with an introductory section that set the tragic scene of the  principal character’s suicide. The reader is soon provided with chronological information about when the novel takes place (in 1941, shortly after the start of the Second World War) and given a topologic background (a river scenery). What is going to happen is slowly disclosed through clues: the two “notes” left by the woman to “Leonard” and “Vanessa” are easily associated with suicide notes. Going on reading, the audience knows the character is a writer: in this way he is able to recognise the woman identity and to discover she’s the famous writer that committed suicide, Virginia Woolf. On her way to the river, she mets some people (a worker digging a ditch, a fisherman) and thinks about her failure as a writer and as a person, maybe for her mental illness. She notices the bombers in the sky, a sign of war, or a sign of madness, depending on if they’re real or not. Finally she throws herself “unwillingly” on the river, while her husband reads her letter and goes out to look for her.

The language used reproduces exactly the flow of her thoughts in those moments, even it implies the third person narration. The facts are decribed throug simple and short sentences,  fast as the hurried looks Virginia gives to what surrounds her. The paratactic syntax can be compared to the language of cinema: the short main closes can be associated with the scenes captured by a motion picture camera. As it happens in movies the reader is brought rapidly from one image and from one point of view to another (indeed there’s a passage, a sort of flash in the future, about Leonard, or one about a child and her mother on the bridge).