The Mark On The Wall - Analysis of Human Thought in a scope of Stream of Conscie Essay

Virginia Woolfs The Mark On The Wall - Analysis of Human Thought in a scope of Stream of Conscience.

Being original Virginia Woolf decided not to follow the typical patterns and plots of the story in her works of fiction. As if she wanted to share her development of narrative subjectivity, she presented the nonlinear narrative study of human thought by internal monologue in her short fiction title The Mark on the Wall.

Her introspection consists of jumping from topic to topic, analysing the insights of memory, all organised into chaotic from the first impression but perfectly organised pattern of human thought and demonstration of control.

Woolf presents the process of thought as an act of asking question after question, without waiting for any response. The whole narrative begins with uncertain statement about a date when the Mark on the Wall has ever been noticed - somewhere in the middle of January, in winter time, upon afternoon tea, while smoking a cigarette all constructed as questions, with no necessity for answers. It is worth to add, that the Mark on the Wall plays the role of interrutpion to the train of thought.

Following modern psychological theory Woolf regarded life as a series of separate and successive moments. Woolf attemted to get deeper and deeper into the human consciousness and move so freely backward and forward in time that the unity and place has no significance.

It is impossible to analyse above mentioned train of thoughts with no remark on modernist subjectivism which establish the personal experience as fundamental of all measure of perception.

In other words, Subjectivism holds that all knowledge depends on the sensory perception of oneself. In accordance, the narrators memory constantly shifts back and forth between the past and present. Even if we may have a feeling that she describes the moment when she sees the mark, she describes many other sensations and memories and aims to react against imposed structures.

Mark on the Wall contains numerous examples of attempts to deny doxa the common beliefs and judgements widely accepted by society. Beginning with phrase that old fancyconnected with capriciousness and imagination, contributing a decent space to definition of knowlesge concluding with tablecloths as a relation to war and reigh of masculinity, narrator lets her mind wander freeliry uniterrupted after putting her attention back to mark on the wall. Focusing on the mark on the wall appears as the only way to stop the mind from pursuing a doxa.

Fancy as single word is too weak and light to explain what the story endorses but it certainly expresses capriciousness, and is more than a simple daydream. The truths realized in the narrator's reverie are not frivolous thoughts used to take up time in idle moments.

Learned men, to the narrator, are merely people who have recorded their experiences. Woolf concludes that if we waste less of our own mental energy thinking about what they saw as "knowledge," the more we can understand our own minds.

Last, but not least of above mentioned doxa tablecloths are explained in the scope of rules for how tablecloths had to be made during a time in the past, which leads into thoughts on reality, followed by the masculine standard of the times, and then a mention of the war and a hope.

Furthermore, Woolf indicates that attention is simply the direction of thought and one cannot balance one's attention inattentively. The idea of letting the mind sway may at first seem inattentive, but the attention in this story is constantly being parceled out, allocated to certain thoughts in a carefully tended manner.

As example of analysis of human thought, Woolf is using the narrator as a model. The author performs an investigation into human beings' control over their own thoughts the ability to stop them or take action because of them.While the jumping from idea to idea may not be planned, it does not occur without the thinker's attention. The sensitiveness to the order of thoughts connects to the contempt for those we assume, who don't think, while the narrator proves her intellectual control by halting unpleasant thought trains by focusing her attention on the mark.

The Mark on the Wall concludes with the narrator's discovery that the mark on the wall was a snail. This realization endsthe story, but it can be assumed that the narrator's internal monologue does not end here, the story proves that internal monologues persist through our waking lives, only interrupted by action. The narrator explains to us that interruptions are part of human thought patterns. The final collision with reality comes with the story's last sentence. This aspect of human thought, along with doxa, order of thoughts, and reflection, are Woolf's observations on how the mind works in solitude.