The 1910s and early 1920s were filled with sob stories about men who gave their lives for their country during the first war world. Poems, songs, radio plays and many novels are dedicated to this topic. These stories almost all centered on a young man, from a good family, who had the whole world at his feet and a long and successful life ahead of him. This young boy would later be called to serve in the "great war" and, being a brave and noble boy, he would not refuse. Instead, he would take up arms and go with friends, brothers, and complete strangers to fight an unexpectedly bloody war, only to die in battle. Some of these works, such as Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, “What Matters?” by Siegfried Sassoon. or All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, for example, take a decidedly anti-war tone, denouncing the conflict as a useless parody. Others, such as John McCrae's “In Flanders Field,” see war as a more noble undertaking. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay But none of these narratives, whether pro or anti-war, optimistic or pessimistic, interest Virginia Woolf. In an attempt to create a novel for the new age, he writes about war from a completely different moral perspective. The world is already full of books about courageous young male heroes, so his book, Jacob's Room, will not feature such a character, in fact, it will ostentatiously lack it. Many works of fiction already decry the loss of innocence, so she won't worry about that, but rather look into the boring future that most of these men have actually lost. And he will also try to reveal to us the real victims of this war: not the dead, but the women who must take back the dying and continue fighting. In this essay I will examine the ways in which Jacob's Room undermines, mocks, and questions the male martyr narrative, through its innovative format, use of familiar settings, and martial diction. Let's first examine how the story describes, or does not describe, its characters. As mentioned in the previous paragraph, Jacob, the character the book is apparently "about", does not appear as such in the story. He is seen, thought about, and influences other characters, but he himself never serves as the central figure: we do not see the world through Jacob's eyes. Instead, we see the world through the eyes of a multitude of other characters, many of whom are only indirectly related to the so-called "protagonist." the first chapter: “'Scarborough,' Mrs. Flanders wrote on the envelope, and drew a bold line beneath; it was his hometown; the fulcrum of the universe. But a stamp? He rummaged in his bag; then he held it with his mouth facing downwards; then he rummaged in her lap, all so vigorously that Charles Steele in the Panama hat suspended his paintbrush,” (Woolf 4). Seamlessly, Woolf's story shifts from being about a country widow, to a painter trying to get the image right. It's a rather unimportant moment from a narrative perspective, but there's more to this frequent bouncing between points of view than just narrative convenience. There is no reason why this book should be about Betty Flanders, as opposed to Charles Steele, or Charles Steele as opposed to Mrs. Jarvis. Woolf tries to create a story that has a place for everyone in it; to deliberately exclude Steele's struggles, however picayune, would be akin to an act of violence, silencing him forever with the samesafety of an axe. This story is completely contrary to the typical war novel, before, during and after the First World War. From Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun to Stephen Crane's Red Badge of Courage, most novels written about and during war focus on the events of the war itself and how a specific individual suffers from or affects the event. But this is obviously not how conflict works. It relies on multiple people, many of whom are not present in the conflict itself. In many ways, although it does not involve violence or combat, Jacob's Room shows the war in its enormity and entirety more accurately than the narcissistic parables of many other war-based stories. Rather than rely on the audience's ability to sympathize with an individual figure, Virginia Woolf presents us with a cavalcade of characters, then shows us the world through their eyes and how each of them, however indirectly, is affected by war and soldiers in It. Jacob, he seems to tacitly state, was not the only victim of the war, nor were men the only victims. This is reinforced by the non-traditional plot. The story doesn't move linearly or stay anchored in one place, but rather bounces through time and space, focusing on everything from the most picayune situations to the doldrums of life. These, however, are not depicted as such. What might pass as filler in another story is treated here with love and respect. Take, for example, the exchange between Betty Flanders and Mrs. Jarvis in chapter eleven: "'I never pity the dead,' said Mrs. Jarvis, moving the pillow behind her back and clasping her hands behind her head. Betty Flanders did not he did it" you hear, because his scissors were making so much noise on the table. "I am at rest," said Mrs. Jarvis, "and we spend our days doing silly and useless things without knowing why." Mrs. Jarvis was not nice in the village,” (Woolf 181). Both the surface content and the internal workings of these few sentences shed light on Woolf's criticism of war fiction, namely that young men who go to die have a narrative, representationally and cosmically, where many others have not The first sentence of this passage is Mrs. Jarvis stating that she has no sympathy for those who have died: given the context and subject matter of the book, this is inevitably interpreted. like those who fought in World War I, or at least includes them. As she says so, Mrs. Jarvis engages in a superficial and thoughtless movement, designed to give her more comfort , does not pay attention. She is completely encapsulated in her current task, and it is so loud and all-consuming that she does not understand what her friend said. Next, Mrs. Jarvis says that the dead rest. Their time has come to an end. Something with an ending has meaning, definition, and meaning is better than almost anything else at erasing the pain. Not only does the act of being killed end life and all the little hurts and disappointments that come with it, it also makes what the dead person did matter, or part of a story. The soldiers, including Jacob Flanders, who died in World War I had one purpose: to die for their country. Many of them did not even live long enough to doubt that purpose. But no one plays the recruiting songs of Mrs. Jarvis and Betty Flanders, or claims that the countless emotional sacrifices and compromises they made were made for a purpose. This is why Ms. Jarvis continues, “And we spend our days doing silly, pointless things without knowing why.” Not only is this true on a larger scale: the living do notthey are made martyrs or subjects of stories, while the dead are often used as heroes or exemplars in social narratives, but even in the passage we see both women engaged in insignificant and unimportant tasks designed in their own ways to provide comfort. Mrs. Jarvis's movements and shifts provide her with a position in which she feels best, while Betty Flanders' cutting drowns out Mrs. Jarvis's harsh words. Yet despite suggesting that this moment is tiny and ultimately meaningless, the entire novel is made up of such exchanges. , chance encounters and random moments, not boastful deaths or exaggerated accusations. What in some other books might have passed for a conversation over tea accompanied by household chores, here resembles something from a gladiatorial game, with epic implications. Clearly it is because Woolf thinks that these mundane events are in their own way of crucial importance - no more and no less than a bloody battle - and, above all, because she is attempting to provide some kind of meaning to the overlooked and nameless civilians of the world. war, which, while they were alive, they never found nor were they ever given. Another such example comes very near the end of the novel, when, lying alone in bed, Betty Flanders hears a loud booming noise that she has come to associate with martial activity: "Once again, far away, she heard the dull sound, as if nocturnal women were beating great carpets. There was Morty lost and Seabrook dead; his sons fighting for their country. But were the chickens safe? toothache? No. The nocturnal women beat large carpets. His chickens moved slightly on the perches” (Woolf 246). Previously, Betty had mistaken these dull noises for guns, but now she describes them as “nocturnal women who they beat large carpets.” In doing so, he equates the fairly mundane task of removing dust from a carpet with the riots of the First World War. More importantly, he describes the women as nocturnal, not only because he is currently in bed at night, but because wars the women who fight in this world are invisible, shrouded in darkness, hidden from view by the heavy blows and bloodshed of war. In the next few sentences, we see her clinically examining a list of “victims” or men in her life who have left for one reason or another. But even so, the act of losing her children and her lovers doesn't affect her as much as the other little battles she has to avoid losing: the chickens in the chicken coop, someone downstairs, Rebecca's bruised mouth. Seabrook is dead, his troubles are over. Jacob will also be leaving soon. But Betty does not need to lose her chickens to foxes, nor her property to thieves. In fact, he eliminates the list of dead male relatives to focus more clearly on the tasks still to be done. And even when she is assured that the chickens are safe, like her, moving only slightly, the ever-present thunder still looms over them all. She stands to lose more, but she can do nothing but wait, and occupy her mind with thoughts of her chickens, until more news arrives of her children, or of the war. She suffers the same stress, but has been denied the agency and recognition given to her male colleagues. A passage in the book that I found extremely important was the following: “You could read year after year – the unpublished works of women, written by the fire in pale profusion, dried by the flame, for the blotting paper – the paper is holed and the nib split and congealed” (Woolf 123). All the passage tries to say is that women write as many manuscripts as men, countless different works of..