Virginia Woolf's Use of the Narrator

Clearly, Woolf's works do straightforwardly challenge the expectations of traditional narration in fiction. Picking any of her works, we find that we have entered a special world where we simply do not have our feet planted solidly on the ground of traditional narration, and we are forced to alter our own consciousness in order to tune into what is going on in the novel, in its form, and in the narration.

The implication of the "pattern of soliloquies" in Woolf's The Waves is that the traditional approach to narration is inadequate in expressing what the author wants to say, inadequate in bringing to life the world the author envisions and in which her characters dwell. The entire book --- except for brief passages of poetic description of the natural and man-made environment --- is composed of characters' speeches, some connected to one another, some not so apparently connected.

The attraction of traditional narration for the reader has to do with familiarity, with comfort, with ease. The reader of fiction traditionally narrated knows what to expect, and there is a certain amount of pleasure, conventional though it is, in having one's expectations fulfilled, in form as well as in substance.

It is clearly Woolf's intention to shatter the reader's comfort

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ell. Caramagno writes: "The reconnection between mind and world threatened her with a sudden, dispiriting deflation of self. The shock of falling out of solipsistic mania taught her the integrity of objects, their objective solidity, independent of the illusions her 'unreal' self could foster about the real world" (Caramagno 15). Caramagno goes on to draw a connection between the "real" Woolf and the depressed character of Rhoda in The Waves, arguing thereby that her unusual use of narrative is a means whereby she can express and in some sense expiate her mental turbulence by seeking a unifying force under the "veils of illusion": "Like Rhoda in The Waves, the depressed Woolf feels naked and vulnerable, stripped of all illusions, as empty on the inside as the world appears to be on the outside . . . Helpless and hopeless, Woolf feels as if the 'veils of illusion' have been drawn, leaving her 'to face a world from which all heart, charity, kindness and worth had vanished.' All her worst fears seem validated by what she perceives. Self is a blank, powerless, with no value and no capacity to generate fiction, which at least would provide evidence that a self existed" (Caramagno 16). It is not the aim of this study to offer a
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Approximate Word count = 2185
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)

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