The Unremitting Pursuit For Interior Reality

As a great modern novelist in the twentieth century, Virginia Woolf claims an incontrovertible place in the history of English literature. This thesis is intended to make some study of the different artistic techniques in the three novels representing her different periods of fiction writing, in order to show that behind the persistent efforts of the artistic experiment lies Virginia Woolf's unremitting pursuit for the interior reality.The thesis consists of five parts. Part one is mainly the discussion of Virginia Woolf's theory of the interior reality and the task of a novelist as well as the general introduction of the paper. The following part talks about Virginia Woolf s important artistic technique — "moments of being", by which she succeeds in expressing the heroine's growing awareness, and her language skill in revealing the characters' inner emotional states, including the use of single charged utterance, in The Voyage Out. In the third part, the stress is placed on the analysis of one of Woolf's most significant artistic techniques - multipersonal representation of consciousness in To the Lighthouse, thus demonstrating how Virginia Woolf successfully turns from the exterior world to the inner world, revealing the novelist's conscious efforts to pursue the interior reality. In the fourth part, it reveals that Woolf's art of fiction arrives at another peak. Different from To the Lighthouse and other excellent novels of stream of consciousness, which almost completely focus on what is going on in the characters' consciousness, Between the Acts is covered, to a large extent, with the characters' speech. This part, therefore, is devoted to the analysis of the fragmentation and ineffectuality of the language of both the play and the characters. It is by this artistic technique that Virginia Woolf manages to convey the fragmentation of modern consciousness and the destructive tension people are caught in. The last part is the conclusion.