Jacob's Room Character Analysis

There on the sand not far from the lovers lay the old sheep’s skull without its jaw. Clean, white, wind-swept, sand-rubbed, a more unpolluted piece of bone existed nowhere on the coast of Cornwall. The sea holly would disperse a little dust – No, but not in lodgings, thought Mrs Flanders. It’s the great experiment coming so far with young children. There’s no man to help with the perambulator. And Jacob is such a handful; so obstinate already. (Woolf 11)

In the beginning of the novel, Betty Flanders was on sea-shore with Archer and Jacob. When Betty comes to take Jacob for home, he was trying to get a crab. She scolds him for being a naughty child and also worried for him. In this paragraph Woolf has mingled third person and first person narration.

An attempt to grasp life in its totality is impossible. We may grasp parts of a character's personality but never the whole. In Jacob’s Room, Virginia Woolf has tried to give a fragmented account of a torn and tossed young man Jacob Flanders. The impressions of him that we are given are not co-ordinated into a whole. The novel is episodic; and although the episodes are linked together, the relations between them are not always close or inevitable. Jacob's character is never unfolded in chronological sequences. Rather from time to time glimpses of Jacob are shown in his interactions with different people at different stages of his life. Even, Jacob does not speak longer dialogues which reveal his personality. Woolf shifts her narration from a character to the other one or she shifts from one scene to the other. She begins a scene, leaving it half a way, she begins the new scene, elaborates it to some extent that the reader forget the earlier one, leaving the latter also half way she adds many a new incidents in between. When, the first scene gets totally out of mind and when readers are fully engrossed in the new scene, she brings back the first scene. This makes the whole novel fragmentary. She begins Chapter-5 ‘‘I rather think’ said Jacob, taking his pipe from his mouth ‘it’s in Virgil,’ and pushing back his chair, he went to the window.’ (pg-68) Now, instead of explaining what is in Virgil, Woolf described many other things like – Post-office vans, Tortoise sellers, long description of omnibus, long narration of St Paul’s Cathedral, old blind woman, Lady Charles, Queen of England – Victoria etc. for four pages and