Unsettling, Homogenous Fiction: The Uncertain Boundary Between Life and Art Kayla Kibbe College

While long form fictional prose may seem like a simple enough concept, the novel – despite the prevalence and relative ease with which it rests in the modern consciousness – is a far more complex entity than any such one-dimensional definition can do justice. Standing on the premise of verisimilitude, the novel actively refuses definition based on either what it is or is not, but rather sets for its ultimate goal the representation of that which is like reality, but is in fact not. Thus, in the quest for verisimilitude, any novel is at its heart a paradox.

If one of the hallmarks of the modernist era was experimentation with the form of the novel, conventional verisimilitude by no means escaped untouched. Despite it opacity, this paradox at the core of the novel met the same fate in the hands of the modernists as the genre’s more easily identified conventions. While plot, narration, and character underwent significant and sometimes nearly unrecognizable revisions beneath the modernist’s pen, the already convoluted notion of verisimilitude inevitably both reflected these innovations as well as endured its own contortions.

Often considered Virginia Woolf’s first truly experimental novel, Jacob’s Room leaves no conventional...