Learning Paths » 5A Interacting
A.
Just considering the first sentence of the quotation, the reader can note it deals with Woolf's style.
Free indirect style tells the reader of the characters' inner thoughts and feelings.The hides her/his omniscience and sets the narration in an internal perspective.
The second sentence makes the reader think about the psychological realism which characterizes Woolf's style. Indeed in her literary and critical essays she asks herself: 'is life like this?' By the word 'this' she means the way Victorian writers used to describe reality.
She argues that orthodox conventions and traditional moral values make the writer obliged to create a plot to control each single narrative element (characters and setting for example).
If the writer were free from the traditional strict conventions, s/he would describe reality in a straightforward way, without the need of moral or ethic justifications, so that they would come as a shower of infinite sensations.
It follows that 'the everyday is seen in a new light': take for example Woolf's novel 'Mrs. Dalloway', published in 1925. Clarissa Dalloway, a middle aged woman of the bourgeois class, is shopping to get everything ready for the party she is going to give in the evening. She has just gone outside of the fishmonger's, along Bond Street, and she is going to the florist's. In her short walk her mind remembers her youth at Bourton, she thinks about her daughter's friend.
The internal narrator provides the reader with Clarissa's flashing thoughts: memories and sensations are closely tied together in the stream of consciousness. It is also important to highlight the lack of logical connections or syntectical order, indeed characters can neither reflect or perceive sensations. Woolf's language is 'enormously poetic'.