
3 RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
The main character of the story is a woman, who
sitting in the room suddenly notices the mark on the
wall. The story is based on the thoughts and ideas that
the woman has while observing the mark and trying
to find its’ origin: “I must jump up and see for myself
what that mark on the wall really is- a nail, a rose-
leaf, a crack in the wood?”(Woolf 8) Thinking about
the mark, she also dives into different thoughts
ranging from the war “Curse this war! God damn this
war” (10), nature “Nature counsels, comforts you,
instead of enraging you” (8-9), women and men “the
masculine point of view which governs our lives,
which sets standards” (6-7), self-actualization “I wish
I could hit upon a pleasant track of thought, a track
indirectly reflecting credit upon myself” (5), and each
time the mark on the wall serves to navigate the
infinite stream of ideas that the character has.
Such floating of thought was possible due to the
narrative technique, known as the stream of
consciousness, which refers to the depiction of the
conscious and subconscious world of the character,
by detailed delivery of the narrator’s thoughts and
impressions. William James, American philosopher
and psychologist, who coined the term “stream of
thought” and “stream of consciousness”, in his book
The Principles of Psychology, outlines five important
characteristics of thought: “1) Every thought tends to
be part of a personal consciousness. 2) Within each
personal consciousness thought is always changing.
3) Within each personal consciousness thought is
sensibly continuous. 4) It always appears to deal with
objects independent of itself. 5) It is interested in
some parts of these objects to the exclusion of others,
and welcomes or rejects, chooses from among them,
in a word all the while” (James 225). These
characteristics align with Woolf’s stream of
consciousness technique, emphasizing the continuous
and changing nature of thought, as well as its
selective focus on certain objects, mirroring the
protagonist's contemplative journey in Woolf’s story.
According to F.M. Khajieva, stream of
consciousness is “a narrative style that mirrors the
unstructured, free-flowing nature of human thought,
presenting a character’s immediate and often
fragmented stream of thoughts and
perceptions.”(Khajieva 65) In the short story “The
Mark on the Wall” such technique enabled the writer
to cover almost every issue that the society of the
period had within several pages. Therefore, the
importance of narration cannot be neglected and
needs to be analyzed.
First, it is important to note that the rise of interest
in human nature and psyche was observed in the XX
century. Fundamental works of Sigmund Freud in
psychoanalysis and unconsciousness provoked the
urge for self-reflection. James Harker also mentions
that in most of the Virginia Woolf’s characters’
“inner life is rich with sensation and thought, inspired
by the lowest and most common of material artifacts”
(2). In the story the main character is also trying to
reflect the unconscious parts of her mind: “I want to
sink deeper, away from the surface, with its hard
separate facts” (5). She is trying to explore every
aspect of her unconsciousness, dive deep into own
inner world, as she finds it intriguing: “I want to think
quietly, calmly, spaciously, never to be interrupted,
never to have to rise from my chair, to slip easily from
one thing to another, without any sense of hostility, or
obstacle” (5). Such aspiration to think and reflect
upon oneself in the literary analysis, considering the
narrative technique, is called stream of
consciousness. Harker exemplifies such narration by
describing how “characters are constantly observing
and thinking as they navigate the world, whether that
means sitting alone in a room contemplating an
ordinary object, taking a walk, going to a party or
looking out the window” (2). Such techniques of
narration became common during the XX century in
the works of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf.
In “The Mark on the Wall”, the character also
depicts the way the thoughts and memories emerge.
“How readily our thoughts swarm upon a new object,
lifting it a little way, as ants carry a blade of a straw
so feverishly, and then leave it” (3). All the thoughts
that the woman has are as quick flashes appear for a
moment and suddenly perish, again focusing of the
small mark on the wall, which in my opinion, hardly
resembles the reality, but instead is the perfect
representation of the changeable period where the
story is set.
However, another interesting opinion about the
snail, its’ role in the story and narrative technique was
given by Kılıç, who suggests that “the narrator
focuses her creative energy on the snail, the very
mark on the wall; and Woolf portrays the narrator’s
mind at work trying to identify the mark in tune with
the pace of the snail” (21). In other words, Kılıç
considers that the narrative style of the story imitates
the pace of the snail enabling “the text invites its
reader to a rhythm that would allow her to attend to
these images with a similarly slow pace” (20). Such
comparison of the narrative style and its speed can be
significant since it can imply to the ways the thoughts
are originated in one’s mind. At the same time, it
allows the reader to fully immerse into the main
character’s inner world in the authentic manner of
contemplating. Kılıç considers, that “the medium and
the message act in unison to convey the absorbed
interest, the very source and the product of the text”
(21), specifically the words and the structure of the
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