Virginia Woolf's Narrative Strategies: Negotiating between Public and Private Voices

The public/private dialectic informed much of Virginia Woolf's life and writing, and her extensive use of the indirect interior monologue was the stylistic technique which expressed this. The technique also allows Woolf to be flexible and to allow many characters a voice. Often pure narration takes second place to the indirect interior monologue. Thus Woolf's technique, with its constant shifting of voice, foreshadows Postmodernism and is more innovative than stream of consciousness writing. Woolf shows the artificiality of the omniscient narrator and with her use of multiple voices shows the variety of subjectivity.