Following Hints

"In any case life is but a procession of shadows, and God knows why
it is that we embrace them so eagerly, and see them depart
with such anguish, being shadows" (56).

Points for Reflection

"Solid Objects" (1920)

1. Could the description of the two approaching figures at this story’s outset just as easily have been women, or do these characters need to be men given the descriptors appended to them?
2. Is John’s wonder at what he finds in the sand at odds with the nature of his conversation with Charles?
3. The possession of this first object spawns what tendency in John?
4. Are the items John collects valued in and of themselves, or for the imaginative associations they generate?
5. Does John’s preoccupation seem lamentable or laudable? Is this a tragedy?

"Sympathy" (c.1919)

1. At what point can we determine that the narrator’s conclusions are conjecture?
2. What attributes does Woolf render as distinctly masculine?
3. Why does our narrator envy Cecilia?
4. What erases this envy?
5. Does death draw people together here, as happened briefly during the post-death, darkening storm of The Voyage Out, or does it separate them?
6. Does death appear an enviable state?
7. Why does the narrator momentarily wish to remain in this state of musing instead of returning to the real world?

Jacob's Room (1922), chps 1-5

1. Many years pass between the opening of chp. 1 and the close of chp. 2, and the location of Betty Flanders and family jumps from Cornwall (southeast England) to Scarborough (northeast England).  How does Woolf mark time’s passage and character relocations?
2. Do Woolf's stylistic experiments recall any similar innovations in the visual arts--in painting, for instance?
3. How much does the narrator know, definitively, and where does s/he admit ignorance?  Can we explain the narrator’s decided lack of omniscience? [Kyle D]
4. To what end does the narrator repeatedly introduce the specter of death?
5. What range of thematic topics central to the narrative does Woolf introduce in just the novel’s first four pages (3-6)?
6. Why is Betty Flanders uneasy about Jacob (6)?
7. Is the narrator more serious than sly when s/he suggests that women are nicer than men (6)? Is this gender-charged thesis supported or interrogated by the rest of the novel?
8. What motivates Mr. Barfoot’s attentions to Elizabeth (“Betty”) Flanders?
9. What does the narrator mean by suggesting that Mrs. Barfoot is “a prisoner—civilization’s prisoner” (17)? Is she imprisoned by her own choices, or by circumstances outside her control? Do any other women in the novel occupy a similar position?
10. Why is Betty Flanders irritated by the thought that Jacob is probably “‘after his butterflies as usual’” (20)?
11. Does the novel answer the question it poses about whether the light of Cambridge burns, “not only into the night, but into the day?” (22)?
12. Is Mrs. Norman’s observation that “men are dangerous” -- a critique she instinctively applies to Jacob before withdrawing it moments later -- meant to be disregarded as the overreaction of a silly woman (21)? Is there any indication elsewhere in the novel that men are, indeed, dangerous?
13. Upon what does Woolf appear to be commenting by her placement of the description of insects knocking their heads against a lantern’s glass in the darkened forest (23)? 
14. Why does Woolf repeat the motif of the tree falling (16, 23)? Any ideas about its symbolic value?
15. How does Jacob set about renewing his confidence following his first luncheon with a professor and a few fellow undergraduates?
16. What does Jacob think that the don (i.e. professor) and wife who’ve just hosted the luncheon (to which he arrived an hour late) should read instead of Fabian (socialist) writers like George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells?
17. Does the confident, male brand of academic knowledge nurtured at Cambridge betray any lacunae?
18. Does the narrator find more to praise than pity in the three Cambridge professors whose privacy we invade?
19. Does the narrator configure the clock appear as a female or male invention?
20. The reader learns that, having successfully navigated his and Jacob’s way to the Scilly Isles, Timmy Durrant is a sight that “would have moved a woman” (35). Is this Jacob’s perspective and opinion, or the narrator’s?
21. How long does Jacob appear to be in the water after diving in (36)? Why would I ask such a seemingly inconsequential question? What does the answer chosen by the reader tell us about Jacob?
22. Is the narrator’s critique of Jacob’s arrogance and naïveté harsh and sarcastic, or gentle and forgiving (or something else altogether)?
23. Attempt to decipher the following cryptic passage: “[Sorrow] is brewed by the earth itself. It comes from the houses on the coast. We start transparent, and then the cloud thickens. All history backs our pane of glass. To escape is vain” (37).
24. Why is the reader not privy to the specifics of Jacob’s and Timmy Durrant’s conversation as they approach the Scilly Isles off Cornwall?  What of the other conversations in the book, the contents of which remain unknown to the reader? Why might Woolf include these moments while withholding their contents?
25. Does Jacob appear to believe in the supernatural?
26. Consider the interactions between Mrs. Pacoe and Mrs. Durrant (41-42). Are one female’s mind and social position more enviable than the other’s?
27. Why does Jacob not react to the formal dinner situation at Mrs. Durrant’s in the same way he did to the meal at the Plumers’ villa?
28. What do Miss Julia Eliot’s and Mr. Clutterbuck’s differing responses to the stars reveal about each of them (46), and does Woolf appear to be reinscribing a gendered difference in humanity’s responses to Nature?
29. Mrs. Durrant considers Jacob, though “‘distinguished-looking,‘” to be “‘extraordinarily awkward’” (47). Is this an accurate assessment of the young man we observe across the first half of the novel?
30. Why does Clara Durrant hope Jacob will not say he loves her (48)?
31. At what points is the narrative on page forty-nine free indirect discourse which takes us into Jacob’s mind, and at what points are we reading about the narrator’s own opinions and perceptions?
32. What narrative purpose is served by the assorted women who appear only briefly throughout the novel but never encounter Jacob himself?
33. With what tone does the narrator discuss that “system of classification” created by “nature and society” (53)?
34. What is the choice the narrator has so much difficulty making (53)?
35. Does the narrator split the difference between celebration and lament, or does one tone win out over the other?
    
    
    
    Self-Portrait with Cloak (1901)
    Pablo Picasso

Dr. Paul Marchbanks
pmarchba@calpoly.edu