The Modernist movement began as a response to the brutality of World War I. No longer did writers feel that conflict in fictional stories ought to be resolved with a neat ending. Modernist works instead focused on how the psychology, or mental makeup, of their characters could be affected by random and unconscious factors. Nonlinear narratives do not follow time order but instead mimic the disjointed flow of a person’s thoughts with devices such as flashbacks and fantasies. Stream-of-consciousness narration attempts to capture how an individual’s mind functions in real time, with trivial and personal concerns bumping up against a person’s most important needs and desires in a seemingly arbitrary and not strictly logical pattern.
DIRECTIONS: Identify how each passage from Mrs. Dalloway displays Modernist characteristics.
Text from Mrs. Dalloway
Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. For Lucy had her work cut out for her. The doors would be taken off their hinges; Rumpelmayer’s men were coming. And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning—fresh as if issued to children on a beach.
How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was)
solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen…
…Peter Walsh. He would be back from India one of these days, June or July, she forgot which, for his letters were awfully dull; it was his sayings one remembered: his eyes, his pocket-knife, his smile, his grumpiness…
For having lived in Westminster—how many years now? over twenty,—one feels even in the midst of the traffic, or waking at night, Clarissa was positive, a particular hush, or solemnity; an
indescribable pause; a suspense (but that might be her heart, affected, they said, by influenza) before Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed.
