Abstract: One of the characteristics of the twentieth-century novel is a preoccupation with ontology; novelists often are more interested in consciousness and being than in character or behavior and more concerned with the event than with anecdote or narrative. Two writers whom this most clearly applies are Virginia Woolf and Marguerite Duras. In fact, a careful examination of one work of each, Woolf's The Waves and Duras' The Ravishing of Lol Stein, shows that, without ascribing any direct influence Virginia Woolf, one can aptly consider the two novels as firstand second-generation ontological studies.' Throughout the works of Virginia Woolf there is an almost uniform thematic concern with the nature of being. In her first novel, The Voyage Out, she probes for the meaning of Rachel's life, examining both its separateness and uniqueness and its unity and communion with the lives of those about her. Mrs. Woolf concerns herself primarily, even in this otherwise conventional novel, not with what Rachel is like but with what it's like to be Rachel. She seeks identify Rachel's vision. Her experiments in such works as Jacob's Room and To the Lighthouse reflect her desire examine the luminous halo, the semi-transparent envelope,2 that is life as the individual consciousness receives it and establish the quiddity and quality of each person's experience. In Orlando, her expressionistic jeu d'esprit, a single personality projected against a backdrop of different places and eras journeys through the
Publication Year: 1971
Publication Date: 1971-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 3
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