Virginia Woolf: Narrative Technique in her Novels with Special References to ‘Mrs Dalloway’

Virginia Woolf, who made the most exciting use of the stream of consciousness technique, was the most distinguished woman writer of the first half of the 20th century. Before we make a detailed study of her narrative technique, we briefly sate it according to B. I. for Evans, the famous literary historian. She usually accepts a plot, which has a simple outline. She next exploits this plot with an impressionism which seizes upon every detail; however, minute, and orders these details not in a rational arrangement, but as they stream through the consciousness of her characters. The novel thus becomes an interior soliloquy (interior monologue) in which diffuseness is avoided by the retention of the central and well-ordered theme. Her acute intelligence makes the perception of every evanescent mood possible, while a diffuse romantic quality adds to the buoyancy of the narration, which accompanies her intelligence and a tenderness without sentimentality aids her in evoking these previously unapprehended human relations. The characters thus captured in the undress of their mental life are such that they share her intelligence and her decencies. We may not be aware of it as we read her novels, but we can see it once Virginia Woolf 's work is compared with the work of James Joyce.