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The Realities of War (Content Warning: Suicide)

  The Realities of War Although the main character of the story in Clarissa Dalloway, Virginia Woolf created a just as, if not more, complex character in Septimus Smith. Septimus is introduced as a war veteran who seems to have lost all sense of what is real, relying on his wife, Lucrezia (Rezia for short), to attend to his every need. We quickly switch to Rezia’s point of view, where we learn more about Septimus’s situation. We learn that he was a veteran of World War 1, and after he quickly marries the daughter, Rezia, of an Italian family who was housing him. Once they are married, Septimus’s psychology quickly deteriorates, prompting Rezia to call upon Dr. Holmes and eventually Sir William Bradshaw. Both doctors attempt to “treat” Septimus in different ways, both of which do nothing but harm Septimus more, which eventually leads to his tragic fate. Virginia Woolf uses the character of Septimus Smith not only as a method of showing Clarissa Dalloway’s inner self but, more impo...
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The Story Within the Footnotes

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    The Story Within the Footnotes      As we learned while reading it, pretty much every conventional aspect of a novel is warped into Nicolas Baker’s stream of consciousness writing style in the novel The Mezzanine. Not only that, but Baker even challenges literary devices rarely even used in novels, specifically footnotes. The footnotes found in The Mezzanine were tangents on top of tangents that continued for pages and made you read the novel in an unorthodox pattern in which you would read a footnote for multiple pages, flip back to the original page, and then reread the entire paragraph because the footnote completely distracted you from what was happening in the story. Baker even goes so far as to mention how amazing footnotes are… inside a footnote. On page 123 of the novel Howie, the main character thinks, “Footnotes are the finer-suckered surfaces that allow tentacular paragraphs to hold fast to the wider reality of the library.” However, even though i...
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