The Impossibility of Doing Away with the Plot: Narrative Identity in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway
The Impossibility of Doing Away with the Plot: Narrative Identity in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway

Summary/Abstract: In some of her essays, Virginia Woolf argues for the dissolution of the plot when capturing life within a literary work and promotes narrative techniques such as the interior monologue which disintegrate the coherent plot through a constant evocation of the past. But it can be argued that life itself can be appropriated by an individual only in terms of an ontological narrative. Therefore, trying to do away with the plot to capture life in a genuine manner seems a rather unattainable goal. And, irrespective of the beliefs displayed in her essays, Woolf’s novels never cease to tell a plot.

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