Questions from V. Woolf's Monday or Tuesday (page 531- Making Waves 2)
Comprehension 

1.    You have read the whole story. What is your first reaction to this example of Woolf’s fiction writing?

2.    What happens in the story?

3.    What strikes you as unusual in Woolf’s short story when compared to traditional narration(plot and structure, narrator, characters, dialogue, …?)

4.    Can you explain why Woolf adopted this way of writing?

Answers

1.    My first reaction to this example of Woolf's writing is confusion because at first I didn’t understand what happened in the story. I felt strange because I expected the text would present a plot, but there wasn’t any precise structure.

2.    There is a heron(a large bird with long neck and long legs) passing over a church “beneath the sky”. The story does not have a clear plot and the reality is told as it appears from the flying heron’s point of view.

3.    The most significant element that strikes the reader’s attention is the absence of a plot and of a precise structure: there are less conversations compared to traditional narration, and the third person external narrator seems to tell a story as it appears from the “lazy and indifferent” heron’s eyes. It doesn’t seem to be a cause – effect relationship.

4.    I think Virginia Woolf adopted this way of writing to render the reality as it appears and to make a critic of the narrative conventions of the 19^th century:

“if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style […]”