The rewriting of The Stream of Consciousness in Virginia Woo

The rewriting of “The Stream of Consciousness in Virginia Woolf’s the Mark on the Wall”

What is the stream of consciousness? Stream of Consciousness is a literary technique which was pioneered by Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce. Stream of consciousness is characterized by a flow of thoughts and images, which may not always appear to have a coherent structure or cohesion. The plot line may weave in and out of time and place, carrying the reader through the life span of a character or further along a timeline to incorporate the lives (and thoughts) of characters from other time periods. ①

The Mark on the Wall, the earliest experimental short story of the stream of consciousness of Woolf, fully shows the typical features of the new technique of fiction writing and truthfully demonstrates the inner world of the character by describing her conscious, meditation, awareness and impression of the external world②. Meanwhile, it is the truthful internal world of the character that reflects the reality and society. The mark on the wall becomes the media connecting the internal world and external one. The snail has hard outside shell and soft interior, which maybe respectively, symbolized to the solid reality the consciousness. Therefore, it is likely that the snail is a perfect symbol of the combination of the two. In it, the author retreats out of the fiction, and makes the readers directly face the character and even the inner conscious of the character of the works. The short story only focuses on some fragments of thoughts flashes through the brain and instant impression occurs in the mind, but it portrays and captures “the moment of importance”.

No matter in style or in artistic from, The Mark on the Wall is the breakthrough to the traditional writing of fiction. It lays a solid foundation for the novel of the stream of consciousness. ①

The rewriting of “The Stream of Consciousness in Virginia Woolf’s the Mark on the Wall”

What is the stream of consciousness? Stream of Consciousness is a literary technique which was pioneered by Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce. Stream of consciousness is characterized by a flow of thoughts and images, which may not always appear to have a coherent structure or cohesion. The plot line may weave in and out of time and place, carrying the reader through the life span of a character or further along a timeline to incorporate the lives (and thoughts) of characters from other time periods. ①

The Mark on the Wall, the earliest experimental short story of the stream of consciousness of Woolf, fully shows the typical features of the new technique of fiction writing and truthfully demonstrates the inner world of the character by describing her conscious, meditation, awareness and impression of the external world②. Meanwhile, it is the truthful internal world of the character that reflects the reality and society. The mark on the wall becomes the media connecting the internal world and external one. The snail has hard outside shell and soft interior, which maybe respectively, symbolized to the solid reality the consciousness. Therefore, it is likely that the snail is a perfect symbol of the combination of the two. In it, the author retreats out of the fiction, and makes the readers directly face the character and even the inner conscious of the character of the works. The short story only focuses on some fragments of thoughts flashes through the brain and instant impression occurs in the mind, but it portrays and captures “the moment of importance”.

No matter in style or in artistic from, The Mark on the Wall is the breakthrough to the traditional writing of fiction. It lays a solid foundation for the novel of the stream of consciousness. ①