Appreciation of the Uncertainty of Life from the Perspective of Moments of Importance
—Virginia Woolf’s The Mark on the Wall 

Abstract

Virginia Woolf, a famous English novelist, essayist and literary critic of 20 century, and also a pioneer of the trend of modern literature, makes a great contribution to the literary creation and literary criticism. She concerns about the mental world of human beings and puts an emphasis on the importance of inner reality. She holds a notion that moment of importance of people can record their true feelings about life and the world. Moment of importance, as Woolf’s concept of literary writing constituting the essence of her concept of truth, is carried out in most of her works.

The Mark on the Wall, Woolf’s first pure stream-of-consciousness fiction, also a short story entirely constructed with a succession of moments of importance, describes various associations triggered by a simple mark on the wall. The images and thoughts about the past, the present and the future come into mind at one moment and collide with each other. Six guesses about the mark seemingly are random-thinking and unordered, however, they reflect the real life of human beings and reveal the truth of life. This thesis would try to deal with the variety and uncertainty of life from the perspective of moment of importance. There will be four parts in my paper. I will start with a brief introduction about the origin and development of modern stream-of-consciousness novels and presents the purpose and significance of this research. The second part will be an introduction of Woolf’s life and her contribution to stream-of-consciousness novels. The third part specifically discusses the theory of moment of importance and its embodiment in the The Mark on the Wall, and then analyzes the theme of uncertain and mysterious life in the article. The fourth part analyzes the influence of the uncertainty of life. The last part comes to conclude that capturing moments of importance, concerning about the spiritual world are very important as we can find the truth of life and the real selves.

Key words: moment of importance, Virginia Woolf, The Mark on the Wall, the uncertainty of life