From Free Indirect Discourse to Jake

            We have recently finished Mrs. Dalloway, and some people have even done a pastiche of Virginia Woolf's writing, so I believe we are all quite familiar with Woolf's style. In Mrs. Dalloway she wrote in free indirect discourse, moving from one character's consciousness to another's whenever she deemed it necessary. Arguably one of the best examples of this occurring in the book was the motor car montage where we see the same situation but from the perspective of so many people. This way of telling the narrative forces the reader to think about not only who's mind we are in, but also how their past experiences will affect how they are viewing the situation. This leads to each scene being dynamic as you get a new prospective each time you change characters.

            There is a different story brewing in The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway, one told from Jake's point of view. Contrary to in Mrs. Dalloway, as we read this book there is only one perspective that we get which forces us as readers to judge the validity of our source. When we were given many different points of view, we were able to decide for ourselves what seemed most trustworthy, but in with Jake as the sole narrator, we will be spending a lot of time talking about his biases and credibility.

            Another difference that, in my first impressions of the book, I have noticed is the difference in sentence format. The sentences formulated by Woolf are longer and less precise which stems from the fact that it is free indirect discourse and the sentences often emulate thoughts. Meanwhile in The Sun Also Rises, the sentences are more direct which is partially Hemingway's style, and also because these sentences are not depicting thoughts as often as in Woolf's novel. These differences in the sentence structure has affected me as I read these books. The long sentences in Mrs. Dalloway often forced me to go back and check if I understood what was happening. Contrastingly, in the first chapters that we have read, these short, direct sentences are easier to read, but as Mr. Mitchell alluded to in class they only give us the tip of the iceberg and we must deduce ourselves the rest of the story.
            From Free Indirect Discourse to Jakes narration is quite a jump in writing styles. Just one example being that Woolf almost never listed the physical attributes of the outside world to set a scene, but in the first sentence of the third chapter Jake does exactly that in a long sentence. We will have to adapt to these differences as we delve into The Sun Also Rises, but I know that I am definitely looking forward to analyzing this book in class. 

Baker vs Woolf and What They Find Interesting

Both Baker and Woolf write about short and seemingly mundane periods of time, whether it is a normal day at work or a June day in England. Having already read The Mezzanine, we have picked up on what Baker finds, to use Howie's favorite word, interesting, and as we indulge further and further into Mrs. Dalloway, we are getting a better and better sense of what Woolf writes about as well. We are able to see what she finds important through her essays and Mrs. Dalloway, and now that we have that better understanding I ask you, "How does Woolf's topic of writing differ or compare to that of Baker's in The Mezzanine?"

From what we have seen over the past weeks in both Woolf's essays and Mrs. Dalloway, it is obvious that she finds characters and their stories to be the focus of her writing, and any fiction writing for that matter. She writes about a group of different characters using free indirect discourse, and through this writing style she tells the reader about the story of many different characters all at once. Her focus on how these characters think and what their beliefs are help us to see how deeply based her novel is in those characters. Woolf tells us little about what is actually happening outside of her characters minds, but rather tells us about what they think about what is going on. For example in the scene with the car backfiring, we are told about who everyone, especially the main characters, thinks is in the car, but we don't learn much about what the area looks like. It is this focus on the unseen and mostly unspoken part of our world that defines Woolf's writing in Mrs. Dalloway.

In The Mezzanine on the other hand, Baker will tell us in painstakingly precise detail about each and every object for example the doorknob. This is something that Woolf's essay would say is materialist. Baker does not only spend his time on describing objects, since the other part of The Mezzanine is a tunnel into the mind of Howie as we see snippets of his past and we learn his views about each and every object and interaction. Since the readers time in The Mezzanine is spent in the thoughts of Howie he ends up being, in my opinion, a more developed and familiar character than any of those in Mrs. Dalloway.

The biggest difference I am able to see in their topics of writing is their focus on objects vs people. Although Baker manages to do a mix of both with his stream of consciousness writing allowing us to understand Howie, The Mezzanine doesn't get close to the amount of information about characters thoughts as in Mrs. Dalloway. So from my experience so far with these two writers I think that although both writers have a fascination with looking into the mind of the characters, the way that they created their characters, Howie focused on everyday objects the others on the people around them, shows us a major difference in these two writers.