JACOB'S ROOM

Jacob's Room is Virginia Woolf's own modernist manifesto, published in 1922, the same year as Ulysses and The Waste Land. It is ostensibly a study of a young man's life on the brink of Universe War I, but it is really a bomb tossed into the world of the traditional book, as she seeks to depict the complexity and randomness of life's interactions. Jacob Flanders is merely a point of contact between a swarm of individuals, appearing and disappearing in a tableau in which everything is in flux, devoid of certainty and a guiding viewpoint. However, it appears that the author was unable to maintain this strict impersonality, and the radical tactic fails, allowing us to perceive Jacob as a person just as his world is blown apart.