Virginia Woolf vs James Joyce Similarities and differences

Similarities•Both of them were Modernist writers

shaping their own tongue to convey new emotions and states of mind

•Alienation, folly, despair, a passive attitude seem to prevail in their characters' lives

•A sort of loneliness all characters seem to be destined despite their social contacts

Similarities•Time dilation: chronological time

doesn't correspond to internal time, use of flashbacks

•Plots lose their relevance in fiction

•Both of the writers start from realism but as well they go beyond it to achieve a sort of psychological realism

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Similarities

•The narrator is always limited with an internal perspective of the characters' mind

•Stream of consciousness technique

•A sort of detachment seems to prevail

Similarities

•A sense of doom seems to prevail

•A peculiar use of symbols to capture the reader and engage him/her in multiple interpretations

•Experimental narrative technique

Differences

•Joyce's narrative technique is more experimental than the one used by V. Woolf who maintains a sort of logical order

•V. Woolf's characters never acquire a myth dimension as the ones by Joyce in Ulysses

•The religious torment which characterizes Joyce's characters, the moral conflict is not so visible in the ones by V. Woolf

•V. Woolf's characters belong to the upper class whereas the ones by Joyce are middle or low class deeply connected to Dublin

•Paralysis and escape as themes seem to prevail in Joyce whereas in Woolf a larger stock of themes is portrayed as feminism, ambiguity, war, neurosis.

•Joyce's characters seem fixed in their perspective of the outer world experience epiphanies

•Joyce's characters are more victims of themselves rather than of outer circumstances, even despite their epiphanies

•Most characters by V. Woolf try a way to react to the outer conditions by adaptation

•Moments of being are a sort of revelation which help characters cope with reality