Not So Ordinary After All
The protagonists of The Mezzanine and Ms.Dalloway are what we would consider mundane protagonists, who have no aspirations or grand adventure to embark upon. However, Howie and Clarissa Dalloway capture our attention and pull us into the minute details of their lives and thoughts. As the authors uniquely develop each stereotypical mundane character’s life, emphasizing Woolf’s point in her essay that anyone’s life can be a novel, the question arises, how do Baker and Woolf make the ordinary extraordinary? Maybe the simplest way to tackle this question is to delve into a quick analysis of how the authors build the characters. In Ms.Dalloway, streams of consciousness are interwoven around Clarissa’s, allowing us to experience the world not only through Clarissa but also through the perceptions of other inhabitants of Clarissa’s world. Using multiple streams Woolf adds sublayers to scenes, such as in today’s discussion of Clarissa’s and Peter’s conversation. If there weren’t any st...