The Formation of a Soldier
Jacob’s Room, the Bildungsroman and the Great War
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.35699/2317-2096.2025.55275Keywords:
Jacob’s Room, Virginia Woolf, Bildungsroman, First World WarAbstract
This article aims to reflect upon the Bildungsroman in the early 20th Century and upon the First World War in Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room. I argue that the formal experimentations with the omniscient narrator and with the protagonist’s characterization allow critical approaches to the individual’s integration into the social realm and to the teleological aspect of the traditional Bildungsroman. With the Great War, the thematic and formal premises of this literary genre radically shifted. In Jacob’s Room, the protagonist’s predetermined death ascertains the novel’s telos (the war) and the impossibility of social integration. In doing so, it questions the very notion of Bildung and the way that reality is represented. In order to discuss these issues, I will focus on the works of Franco Moretti, Judy Little, Gregory Castle and Dorothea E. von Mücke.
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Copyright (c) 2025 Júlia Braga Neves (Autor)
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