Loneliness In Virginia Woolf's The Death Of Scobie

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The skill of the novel exists in its probing of the gap between what belief enjoins and the emotional disorder with which it cannot hold discourse. The ‘heart of the matter’ turns out to be the disintegration of Scobie’s personality under stresses he cannot resolve. He suffers from existential anguish. His suffering is fundamentally the result of a profound despair, a terrible sense of estrangement and loneliness, the pain that follows from his futile efforts to find a meaningful existence. Loneliness can be removed only when men understand...each other through a world common to them, with in which mutual understanding can take place. But when such a common area of understanding does not exist there is estrangement, communication is destroyed …show more content…

In time Scobie becomes her lover, attempting secrecy in a place where nothing is secret and exposing himself to the hostility of a society which sees the conflict between his faith and his behaviour as hypocrisy. To Helen, Catholicism is “hooey”, and his argument that he cannot marry her because as a Catholic he cannot have two wives is only a source of bitterness. None the less, when Scobie has killed himself, and Helen sleeps alone (after rejecting the advances of the Oafish Bagster), “She put her hand out beside her and touched the other pillow, as though perhaps after all there was one chance in thousand that she was not alone, and if she were not alone now she would never be alone again.” (271) Love-the love of God for his creation and the reflection of this in human love-is suggested in this passage, which bears the imprints of Greene’s relationship with Catherine Waltson. Greene was too considerable an artist to lift characters directly from life. Louise and Helen Roll are not portraits of any women in his life, they are projected out of his anguish at what could not be resolved. Catherine’s solution was different from Scobie’s but no less tragic: she died an

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