Jun 21, 2020
But Woolf’s development of stream-of-consciousness is more interesting than that. It allows absent-mindedness into fiction. A character is allowed to drift out of relevance, to wander into a randomness which may be at odds with the structure of the novel as a whole. What does it mean for a character to become irrelevant to a novel? It frees characters from the fiction that grips them; it lets characters forget, as it were, that they are thicketed in a novel.
James Wood on Virginia Woolf in Serious Noticing
