Reality and Perception of Reality in Virginia Woolf's Short Stories

Abstract or Introduction

By using a unique style of writing Virginia Woolf shows how we try to make sense of our lives and give meaning to everything in the world. At the same time there is a profound feeling of not being able to fully understand what this existence is about. By analyzing two of her short stories, “The Mark on the Wall” and “An Unwritten Novel”, I will examine Woolf’s method of showing the contrast between what we think reality to be and what reality actually is. Therefore, I argue that in her short stories Virginia Woolf demonstrates how we construct realities and meanings for ourselves through creating narratives and how easily these narratives are exposed as fragile and unstable.

In the first part of my analysis, I will examine how she uses these narratives to show how we make up realities for ourselves in order to make sense of the outside world. Then, I will continue with analyzing who these constructed realities come from and how she criticizes society through this. Lastly, it will be looked at the fragility of these constructed realities and how Woolf shows that what we think we know and what something really is, are not necessarily the same. She illustrates how incomplete and vague our assumptions and perceptions can be whenever we think we have fully understood something and offers different views on knowledge and reality at the ends of her stories.