Mrs. Dalloway

I started to write the post about this book but realized it's been entirely too long since I finished it to write anything that made any sense. I really need to be better about writing right after I finish the book rather than a month and a half later when I've finished another book. Next year's resolution? Maybe.

Anyway, I did take some notes about what I'd read right away so that I'd have something to talk about. I'll try to make some sense out of them for you.

Notes:

Seamless transition from the inner monologues of one character to another. Woolf weaved the storylines together by connecting the memories of a specific event between two people.

The loneliness individuals feel - no matter how surrounded, all felt misunderstood. You know the saying "a man is an island"? This novel proves that despite the family, friends, colleagues, and everyone else, most people spend a lot of time feeling alone.

Reliability of narrator challenged by shifting points of view. You have to believe what you read with a grain of salt when it comes to having a first person narrator in a novel. In this book there are nearly a dozen narrators, which gives the storyline a lot more believability.

Multiple viewpoints create a more complete snapshot of personalities and relationships. There are things that a person do not notice about themselves and their own lives, but that other people can see more clearly. The multiple viewpoints in this book give a glimpse into what peoples lives are really like.

An almost melancholy portrait of the lives the characters could have had but missed. Almost every character in the book looks back on how their life has played out over the years and sees things they wish they could have done - the places they should have gone, the people they should have married, the friends they should have kept. They all seemed to look at their present life with sadness and desperation.

People still think like this. Did I miss my chance? Do I matter? Is it all worth it? This novel was written in 1925, but so captures the way people think that it is still applicable even now close to a hundred years later.