The Story Archive

Jacob's Room

Virginia Woolf · 1922 CE · Novel · English · Modernist

Jacob Flanders is assembled out of other people's glimpses of him — a boy on a Cornish beach, an undergraduate crossing a Cambridge court, a young man in London lodgings and then in Greece — while the narration keeps declining to enter his mind. Women who half know him, his mother's letters and the objects left in his rooms do the work a character usually does. Woolf's third book is the first written in the method she had been arguing for in her essays, and the gaps in it are what the war is for.

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Attributes

Genre
Psychological
Theme
Isolation & AlienationMemory & TimeWar & ViolenceIdentity & Self
Archetype (Jung / Campbell)
EverymanWanderer
Plot structure
Nonlinear / FracturedIceberg / Ellipsis
Symbol / motif
The HouseThe LetterThe Sea
Conflict
vs Selfvs Society
Mode / tone
ModernistElegiac
Culture / tradition
English

Closest analogues