Come On Guys!

Wow, talk about disappointing. After my intial gushing over "To The Lighthouse" nobody seemed willing to follow it with a discussion of any kind. Well, I am currently reading "Jacob's Room," an early work of Virginia Woolf, which leads me to this blog. "Jacob's Room" is Woolf's first stream of consciousness novel, a work of art in its own right, which would seem more startling and noteworthy if not for the greater successes of "Mrs. Dalloway" and "To the Lighthouse" after it. It also uncovers similar themes of family, art (in this case history and the Greeks in place of To the Lighthouse's painting and literature), and of course, WWI. For as much as WWII dominates the History Channel and occupies about all the shelves in a bookstore's history section, WWI has produced a greater extent of literature and in my mind still remains the Great War. It disillusioned; it maimed if it did not kill first; it stunned and shell-shocked. "Jacob's Room" introduces these themes to a small extent, but if we were to get a discussion going on "To the Lighthouse" we would scratch the surface of what lies beneath the war that nobody talks about, the war that nobody remembers.