Jacob’s Room is a literary fiction book by author Virginia Woolf.
In 1922, the same year as Ulysses and The Waste Land, Jacob’s Room was Virginia Woolf’s own manifesto of modernism. Studying a young man’s life on the eve of the Great War, it’s truly a bombshell into the world of conventional fiction, as she tries to capture the richness and randomness of encounters in life. Jacob Flanders is a point of contact among a crowd of people, appearing and disappearing in a scene in which all is in constant flux, with no certainty and no controlling point of view. The author was unable to maintain this strict objectivity, and the radical technique was broken, so that we finally see Jacob as a human, just as his world is blown away.
One of Woolf’s first fusion/modern novels. Woolf’s two earlier novels (The Voyage Out & Night and Day) were more traditional. This is more like trying to understand the Parthenon, but just by looking at the shadows cast by the sun and the moon, from different directions, night and day, at different times. eventually, one will understand – almost – a lot about the Parthenon. One can also listen, like a blind man, to the conversation of people going up and down the Acropolis. Woman and man. Kids. Tourists and Greeks. Again, the impression of the Parthenon will be sharper, but never as clear.
