Jacob's Room by Virginia Woolf

 

I've decided to read Virginia Woolf's novels in order this year. I began with The Voyage Out and Night and Day, both of which are fine books. One sees, though, why they are probably the least read of Woolf's novels. They are competent and professional, but they aren't Mrs. Dalloway or To the Lighthouse. They are good, but that's all.

With Jacob's Room, though, we see that the Virginia Woolf of those early novels has at last freed herself from Victorian novelistic convention, and begun to make it new. Start with her decision to make Jacob Flanders, the novel's protagonist, a cypher who we know almost entirely from the impressions others have of him. In this she does something that is perhaps parallel to but different from what Joyce (who she dismissed as an "egotistical self-taught working man," even as she acknowledged his influence on Jacob's Room) did in Ulysses. In Joyce's work we follow different characters' streams of consciousness. Woolf, on the other hand, does not give us the stream of Jacob's consciousness, but rather vignettes and impressions.

Vignettes and impressions: Woolf has dispensed with first-this-happened-then-that-happened narrative, and this is one reason that the book's last chapter is startling Given it's subject matter—Jacob's death—that is as it should be. World War I has begun. 

A character describes Jacob's generation as, "simple young men, these, who would—but there is no need to think of them grown old." This is not a war novel; war has arrived.