Exercises at page 531 from Making Waves

Comprehension

1. After reading the extract from Monday or Tuesday, it seems as if the story does not develop following a logical consequentiality. Moreover, you cannot find a true character of the story. Maybe it is the heron. Finally, the organization of the sentences seems to be casual, following not an order.

2.  Well, it is quite difficult to affirm what happens in the story, because it has not a linear development of the plot, as stated in the previous answer. However, the impression is that the third person narrator shows and describes the sliding of some ordinary-life images as they are caught from the eyes of the heron.

3.  Woolf's way of writing the short story appears very different from traditional narration. First of all, the story does not develop following an outlined plot; the main protagonist, the heron, is not well characterized; there is not a syntactical order: it seems as if the text is the result of statements as they are created in the mind of the heron, like a stream of consciousness; there are not dialogues as we normally consider them: within the text there are sometimes some short exchanges.

4. Virginia Woolf is supposed to have adopted this way of writing because her intention was to show that reality can change according to different points of view, as Einstein stated with "the theory of relativity". It follows that reality is not absolute, but relative: the heron's view of reality is surely different from the one of  a human being.