This study will examine criticisms which Virginia Woolf's works make of the traditional narrator. The study will also examine the remedies offered by Woolf's work to the shortcomings of that traditional approach.
Clearly, Woolf's works do straightforwardly challenge the expectations of traditional narration in fiction. Picking any of her works, we find that we have entered a special world where we simply do not have our feet planted solidly on the ground of traditional narration, and we are forced to alter our own consciousness in order to tune into what is going on in the novel, in its form, and in the narration.
The implication of the "pattern of soliloquies" in Woolf's The Waves is that the traditional approach to narration is inadequate in expressing what the author wants to say, inadequate in bringing to life the world the author envisions and in which her characters dwell. The entire book --- except for brief passages of poetic description of the natural and man-made environment --- is composed of characters' speeches, some connected to one another, some not so apparently connected.
The attraction of traditional narration for the reader has to do with familiarity, with comfort, with ease. The reader of fiction traditionally narrated knows what to expect, and there is a certain amount of pleasure, conventional though it is, in having one's expectations fulfilled, in form as well as in substance.
It is clearly Woolf's intention to shatter the reader's comfortable expectations with respect to the form of the novel and its progression through narrative. She is challenging, therefore, not only the traditional narrative form, but also the reader himself. She is making it difficult for him to know what is going on in her book, in the consciousness of her characters, in their relationships, in their reality. However, she is not doing this merely to upset or confound the reader, or to challenge the traditional narr...