Faculty of philology department of english philology viktorija mi

rose from the sofa and went to Peter.
And it was awfully strange, he thought, how she still had the power as she came 
tinkling, rustling, still had the power as she came across the room, to make the mood 
which he detested, rise at Bouron on the terrace in the summer sky. (55) 
As can be seen from the short passage above, linguistic deviations, violations, breaking of the 
old cohesive sentence sequences, and rejection of gradual linear realistic description actually 

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established a new aim of literature: to reveal the picture of human mind, to portray the 
subconscious, and to depict the natural flow of thoughts in one’s mind (as illustrated by the part of 
the extract in bold) which was the essence of a modern human being. The present extract from Mrs. 
Dalloway demonstrates the subtle manner in which the narrative voice shifts and how this shift can 
affect a reader’s perspective, but it can also serve as a criterion by which we can measure Woolf’s 
innovative style of writing. The predicates in bold serve to move the reference time of the narrative 
forward, however, the superficial temporal incoherence occurs in the given extract, which actually 
represents a purposeful violation of the common linear narrative sequence: present moments are 
intermingled with short flashbacks, memories, and impressions.
Indeed, although at first glance the style of writing in modern literature may seem chaotic and 
obscure, this emphasis on absurdity actually help to show the picture of the world from the point of 
view of a modern human. Purposelessness of cruelty, destructivity of progress, alienation and 
loneliness, nothingness of self-important moments of personal experience replicate in human 
consciousness and leave a footnote there. In her novels, having two possible techniques that would 
allow her to enter characters’ consciousness and present their personal impressions, namely, direct 
and indirect style of representation, Woolf chooses to reveal her characters’ interior monologues 
and widely uses the method of Free Indirect Discourse (FID) Thus, it seems certainly that 
modernist literature provides valuable insights of human mind and investigates various patterns of 
thought in different literary discourse. (Jen Green at al. 1999:65) 
Interestingly, Green (1999) develops the insights about the peculiarities of modernist fiction 
by drawing a parallel between the radically new representation of history, temporality, and time in 
literature which has not received much attention in the theoretical and practical analysis of literary 
works. In the theorist’s opinion, time, in modernist literature, is a very important issue that acts both 
as internal or external circumstances and as an active participant in a piece of fiction. Indeed, 
modernist concept of temporality may take the reader through a day in the life of a narrator, 
whereas in Realism, the reader is taken into a year in the life of the characters, as pointed out by 
Stevenson. In his words (1998 :4), “departures from the serial, chronological construction of 
storytelling, for example – its usual beginning, middle, and end – are by no means uniquely the 
invention of modernist fiction.” In Modernism, time is viewed as disjointed and cyclical, and the 
reader is moved from one image to another rather than in a start to finish manner - a juxtaposition of 
events may unfold at once. Similar ideas are expressed by Onega and Landa who foreground the 
fact (1998:207) that the representation of external temporal reality in modernist fiction became 
“atrophied, or, at least, stylized as the focus of attention shifted to the characters’ inner processes -
imaginative and psychological”. Interestingly, Armstrong characterizes modernist literature as “the 

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notion of uneven and competing temporalities” (2005: 7) and states that unlike in Romanticism 
which celebrated the beauty and the value of feelings, modernist authors put emphasis on the 
interrelation of details, separate elements, and pictures, and portray the world as a certain mosaic 
which consists of different experience, spatial, and temporal extracts. By comparison, the theorist 
Ivor Armstrong Richards (1965:124) argues that this belief in a cyclical time also encourages a 
cognitive exploration of the subconscious because the reader can see the attempt to place every 
detail inside the characters’ mind, away from the body and feel free to explore the inner working of 
one’s mind and subconsciousness.
Allen (1954: 65) complements Armstrong, Richards, and Stevenson’s statements by arguing 
that experimenting with language and breaking the norms of traditional writing bring about a 
fascination with the way in which one projects reality within the workings of the mind. Besides, 
Stevenson alleges that the distinctive feature of Modernism in all spheres of art including literature 
is its diversity. Through a close interface study and analysis of Modernism as a cultural, aesthetic, 
philosophical, and literary movement, he explores the connections between the new stylistic 
developments and the shifting politics of reason, mind, and consciousness. Indeed, these 
Stevenson’s insights provide a detailed and useful overview of the twentieth century human 
philosophy and the changing system of norms and values. For instance, according to the linguist, 
the questioning of human life with or without God is one of the most important theoretical and 
philosophical assumptions developed in the period of Modernism. Besides, a modernist human 
being expresses a constant wish to escape from his past and to consolidate in the future, but sees no 
constructive steps that would help him to do this. According to Stevenson (1998:9), “many 
contemporary commentators confirm the extent of new challenges to the period’s life and thinking, 
indicating how inescapable the effects of the new industrialized, technologized modernity of life 
seemed at the time.” Thus, we can arrive at a logical conclusion that all these psychological issues 
were based on the multidimensional character of human mind that was one of the main interests of 
modern writers. 
From above considerations it could be preliminarily concluded that the questioning human 
spirit could be seen as part of a necessary search for ways to make sense of a broken world both in 
the literary works of Romanticism and Modernism, modernist literature often moves beyond the 
limitations of the realist fiction with a concern for larger factors such as social or historical 
emergence of city life as a central force in society. In addition, an early attention to the described 
object as an independent entity became in later Modernism a preoccupation with form. Where 
Romanticism stressed the subjectivity of experience, modernist writers were more acutely conscious 
of the objectivity of their surroundings. In Modernism the object is described, analyzed, and 

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revealed by means of the spatial and temporal circumstances the characters are surrounded by. This 
is a shift from an epistemological aesthetic to an ontological aesthetic or, in simpler terms, a shift 
from a philosophy based on knowledge and experience to an intuitive philosophy shaped by human 
mind. Indeed, this significant shift is the basis of the art and literature of Modernism. (Genienė 
2007:164)