In all my reviews of Virginia Woolf novels, there is one thing I repeat. It is that she doesn’t write stories to conform to the conventional structure. There is no beginning, middle, and end. There is also no proper plot. Instead, her “stories” are a collection of abstracts weaved together in one whole, creating something larger than a story – a painting.
With Jacob’s Room Virginia completely breaks away from traditional storytelling. Her two preceding novels, though experimental, retained the traditional narrative structure. But in her third novel Jacob’s Room, Virginia severs all her ties with the established story structure, firmly establishing her experimental style of writing which has fascinated millions of readers around the world. Added to her novel writing style is her poetic prose and the reader finds herself in a painting filled with impressions; she feels the joy of walking through a dreamy landscape.
Jacob’s Room touches the life span of a young man named Jacob Flanders. His story is told through different character perspectives (his mother, his lovers, and his friends) and the observations of an unnamed narrator. Virginia digs deep into philosophy. She presents us with several Jacobs through the eyes of numerous characters raising the question of who the real Jacob is, since there are so many versions of his. The answer is that none of the accounts reveal the real self of Jacob, for the idea of “self” is illusory. What we see as a person is fragments of images.
The title is Jacob’s Room. What is Jacob’s room? Is it the physical rooms he occupied at Oxford and London? Could it be the characters’ consciousness through which Jacob’s is made known to us? Or could it be Jacob himself who has been reduced to nothingness with his death? To me, it is the second possibility. But you readers might agree on another or could come up with a completely different interpretation. And that’s the beauty of Virginia’s works. They are like kaleidoscopes.
There were a couple of things that surprised me in Jacob’s Room. One relates to her philosophy and the other to her writing. Virginia paints such an illusory picture of Jacob to demonstrate that nobody really knew Jacob. If that’s true, can anyone mourn him? Can you mourn a person who you truly didn’t know? The unemotional ending scene where Jacob’s mother wonders what to do with his shoes speaks volumes. The other surprise is the absence of the stream of consciousness. Although Virginia had turned her back on traditional writing, she has reserved her signature mark – stream of consciousness – for her later works.
In Jacob’s Room, Virginia has not demonstrated the full capacity of her unique style of storytelling, yet the novel amply demonstrates what an eminent writer she would later become. The storyline in Jacob’s Room could at times be confusing. Nevertheless, the readers don’t fail to indulge in the sublime world that Virginia creates with her mystical and dreamy writing.
Rating: 4/5
