Modernism In Jacob's Room

Being one of Virginia Woolf’s first novels, Jacob’s Room is an example of how Woolf incorporated modernism to distinguish herself from other writers and novels. She conveys this theme of modernism with her disjointed syntax. The recollections of Jacob’s mother and closest friends in his life are ambiguous narrations that resemble her theme of humanity, how the readers have a lesson to learn from Jacob’s life. In addition, she uses the the symbolism of the character’s letters to embody her theme of communication which adds to her perspective of death. Woolf brings across her topics of humanity, death, and communication in this novel to bring to the reader’s attention the importance of “living life to the fullest” with her techniques of disjointed

In Jacob’s Room, she portrays the life of Jacob Flanders through the eyes of other human beings with ambiguous narration. We knew things about Jacob that he did not know himself. Woolf portrays Jacob as a symbol of humanity; we are all complicated and have a hard time of doing things…of finding ourselves. In the middle of the novel, she says: “the strange thing about life is that though the nature of it must have been apparent to everyone for hundreds of years, no one has left any adequate account of it” (191). What she means is that humans are seen through the eyes of others, but humans cannot see themselves through their own eyes. How this relates to humanity, is that she is right. Humanity is too busy caring about the eyes of others rather than their own and is too often too late to find themselves, just like Jacob. There was not much he could do when his time came, because he did not know who he was at the time. Woolf’s message of humanity is that all humans should find themselves and become greater persons before it is too late, humanity must learn this lesson from Jacob’s story as he was on the verge of discovering himself just before he