Simultaneity In Literature

Instead of continuity of an action, the writers show a tendency to discontinuity. A continuous action seems to them too unlike ordinary experience. They feel that the sense of life is often best rendered by an abrupt passing from one series of events, from one group of characters, from one centre of consciousness, to another. Therefore, they break narrative frames or move from one level of narration to another without warning. As a result, unlike the conventional novels, there remains the absence of plots. To compensate for the diminution of narrative structure and unity, the novelists found alternative methods of aesthetic ordering, such as allusion to or imitation of literary models or mythical archetypes, and the repetition – with – variation

The narrators in the novels are often strangely limited third-person or unreliable first person narrators. Sometimes there are multiple or shifting narrators. Modernist fiction is non-chronological, with experiments in the representation of time such as sudden jumps, temporal juxtapositions, or spatialization of time, where many different moments of time are presented with an effect of simultaneity. Experiments are also done in presenting the duration by making a great deal occur within a small amount of text, or stretching a small amount of action over a large textual space. Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936), Italian dramatist, writes in his most famous play, Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921):
Each one of us believes himself to be a single person. But it’s not true. Each one of us is many persons...according to all the possibilities of being that there are within us. With some people we are one person. With others we are somebody quite different. And all the time we are under the illusion of always being one and the same person for everybody. We believe that we are always this one person in whatever it is we may be doing. But it’s not true! It’s not true! (Childs

Virginia was born on 25 January, 1882, at Hyde Park Gate in London. She was the daughter of Leslie Stephen (1832-1904), who was a Victorian man of letters and the first editor of the Dictionary of National Biography and Julia Jackson Duckworth (1846-95) who had once frequented pre-Raphaelite Circles. It was the second marriage for each. The first wife of Sir Leslie was Harriet Marian Thackeray (1840-75), who was the daughter of the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-63), by whom he had a weak-minded child Laura. Julia Duckworth was first married to a barrister, Herbert Duckworth by whom she had three children- George, Stella, and Gerald. Julia and Leslie Stephen had four children- Vanessa (1879-1961), Thoby (1880-1906), Virginia (1882-1941), and Adrian (1883-1948). The Stephen family was organized in a typically Victorian way, the father occupying himself with money and intellectual matters and the mother attending to the emotional and social needs of her husband and eight