Posts

Connections Between Clarissa and Septimus

Hello! I'm Sloane and I am here today to talk to you about the multifaceted depictions in which Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Smith become interconnected throughout Mrs. Dalloway  by Virginia Woolf. The most noteworthy, outstanding instance of this interconnection may be Clarissa's mental images of Septimus's suicide. However, we have more to unpack here. Clarissa and Septimus at face value seem almost nothing alike, until you count in their mental inner workings; whether this is through seeking an inner peace through marriage, or struggling to be understood on an introspective level. At a first glance, I wasn't so convinced how the Septimus storyline weaved cohesively with Clarissa's overarching plot of her social life, mainly because the intersections between Septimus and Clarissa's day-to-day plots remain minimal: as they've crossed paths but once, yet not even noticing each other. However, the closer the novel drew to an end, the pieces tied up into a c...

My Thoughts on The Mezzanine: Stream-of-consciousness

Image
Hello everyone! I'm Sloane and I have quite a lot of thoughts on The Mezzanine  by Nicholson Baker: specifically, the character's unique writing style, as displayed through an intricate interweaving of seemingly mundane occurrences (that appear slightly disconnected at first glance) into overarching themes at the end of each chapter. What do I mean by this? To understand how his writing style weaves different components of the narrative together, we must explore his parallels to stream-of-conciousness writing. While The Mezzanine  is definitely not a true depiction of stream-of-conciouness by any means, it draws from certain elements, such as the inner-monologue nature of Howie's mind, and also the long paragraphs and sentences diverging into different thoughts as they develop. I like to imagine it as a tree of ideas, each branching into more and more sections until they accumulate at their own individual points. Traditional stream-of-conciousness will not include punctuati...