Data Bases • Custom Term Papers • Free Term Papers • Free Research Papers • Free Essays • Free Book Reports • Plagiarism? Links • Top 100 Term Paper Sites • Top 25 Essay Sites • Top 50 Essay Sites • Search 97,000 Papers @ DirectEssays.com • Search 101,000 Papers @ ExampleEssays.com • Search 90,000 Papers @ MegaEssays.com Free Essays • Term Paper Sites • Chuck III's Free Essays • Free College Essays • TermPaperSites.com • My Term Papers • Get Free Essays • Essay World • Planet Papers	Search Lots of Essays Back to Subjects - Miscellaneous Jacobs Room Jacobs Room Virginia Woolf is not unlike any other truly good artist: her writing is vague, her expression can be inhibited, and much of her work is up to interpretation from the spectator. Jacob’s Room is one of her novels that can be hard to digest, but this is where the beauty of the story can be found. It is not written in the blatant style of the authors before her chose and even writers today mimic, but rather Jacob’s Room appears more like a written painting than a book. It is as if Woolf appeared tired and bored of the black and white style of writing that dominated her culture and chose to use a paintbrush to write her story. This individualistic technique is essential to how Woolf creates a portrait of Jacob, the title character of the novel. The portrait the reader gets of Jacob is entirely questionable throughout the entire story, just like any understanding of a human in life is more about opinion than fact. This is how Woolf captures life, the reader’s view of Jacob is almost completely based on interpretations from other characters. These various assessments of Jacob form together to make the collective portrait of Jacob. Woolf states that “Multiplicity becomes unity, which somehow the secret of life” (147), the secret of the novel as well. The impressions of Jacob are from many different types of characters in the book. There are random people that we don’t even get the name of, Jacob’s own mother, those that love Jacob and even those whom Jacob love. All these impressions are woven on a common thread, that all human being’s have a need to break isolation and cherish attention, love and concreteness. Jacob’s mother, Betty Flanders, sets up her portrait of Jacob as a son that she has lost. Betty Flanders longs for the attention and love that she lacks as a widow, a mother that is now useless with her three sons away from her. Jacob was “the only one of her sons who never obeyed her” (21), she seems unable to understand her own son. The impression one gets from Betty Flanders about Jacob is blurred and distant. Betty see’s the world “looking through her tears” (18) and communicates with Jacob mostly through letters, without personal contact. Even in the letters, Jacob is hardly the tangible proof of validation that Betty is hoping for. The letters offer Betty, in blatant curtness, create the portrait of Jacob that his life is mystifying and uncertain. “She read his letter, posted at Milan, ‘Telling me,’ she complained...’really nothing that I want to know’; but she brooded over it” (157). Betty Flanders impressions of Jacob show the disconnection from her life and Jacob’s, but also her continuous need for his love in her life. Jacob is continually called “distinguished-looking, seeing him for the first time that no doubt is the word for him” (77). This description is used throughout the novel, a description that is both vague and telling at the same time. We know that Jacob is attractive and alluring, two traits that make him a prime romantic interest to many of his peers. Bonamy, Clara, Florinda, and Fanny are all characters that are attracted to Jacob’s presence. Yet, none of them ever seem able to understand him. All of these characters seem to be stuck in the same void of true connection with Jacob, one that continues the detachment and misreading of Jacob by his own world. To Jacob, Florinda “seemed to him something horribly brainless” (89), he is cautious of Bonomy’s homosexuality and thus pushes him away, Clara’s own virginity (both sexually and spiritually) makes Jacob too “frightening” (77) for her and Fanny is too desperate. These human limitations make the characters constantly in pursuit of Jacob, but never fully able to comprehend him. Their portrait of Jacob is made entirely too much of their own opinion- it is through their own eyes and loneliness that they began to create Jacob instead of fully knowing him. These brief impressions that make up Jacob leaves the reader at loss to what is actual and tangible about Jacob. The truth of Jacob cannot be stretched any further than that he is attractive but awkward at the same time. Woolf is not oblivious of these feeling about Jacob that her reader may have, in fact it is more than likely her intention. Woolf shows us the true portrait of Jacob, one free of bias and personnel interpretation. Jacob’s room is able to give us, at the very least, proof that Jacob does exist and is visible without the corruption of human analysis. The room is described with a certain somber tone to it- the room is filled with books and other material objects that represent concrete and palpable life. Yet, “listless is the air in an empty room, just swelling the curtain; the flowers in the jar shift. One fibre in the wicker armchair creaks, though none sits there” (200). Our proof of Jacob is still empty, alone, and isolated, the same melancholy portrait we had of Jacob from the vague perceptions of the other characters. Jacob’s room furthers the disconnection and isolation that is found throughout the novel. This portrait of Jacob is finished at the end of the novel, but it is ended suddenly with Jacob’s death in the war. The growing portrait of Jacob is terminated, with the reader having a sense the loss of Jacob is more of gain in understanding his character. Jacob’s death is more understood than his life, his death has more existence than his vitality. In life, Jacob was an absence of person, a life that is never fully understood can never truly endure. Jacob seemed more of a need for love and palpable attention from those who surrounded him than an individual existence. Jacob was more of an idea, a spirit that filled countless letters and thoughts, but never fully digested. The final pages of the story leave the reader with Bonomy and Betty Flanders trying to come to terms with Jacob’s life more than his death. “Such confusion everywhere!” (201) is Betty’s best attempt on how to describe the omission of a love that was never really present. The question remains about what to with a pair of Jacob’s old shoes, a question that is left unanswered. Jacob’s shoes, which used to be filled by Jacob himself, have no place, just like Jacob himself. The portrait that Virginia Woolf creates of Jacob is one that is less a true depiction of Jacob himself, but rather the people that tried to interpret him. Jacob's Room is not finally about Jacob, but about the world that forms him. Trying to understand Jacob is task that is just as difficult as finding a place for his empty shoes, at best those who felt closest to Jacob were just observers of his life, “observer(s)...choked with observations” (75). The portrait of Jacob created from the novel is less a portrait and more like a “cavern of mystery, endowing Jacob Flanders with all sorts of qualities he had not at all” (80). Our portrait of Jacob is painted to us by Virginia Woolf about the dubiety, skepticism and wonder over true human existence and if it is at all possible to achievew it. Jacob’s own room is exactly that, something so real and physical that is at the same time departed and lifeless. Bibliography: Jacob's Room Word Count: 1242
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