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. Jacobs 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 Jacobs 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 readers 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 dont even get the name of, Jacobs own mother, those that love Jacob and even those whom Jacob love. All these impressions are woven on a common thread, that all human beings have a need to break isolation and cherish attention, love and concreteness. Jacobs 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 impress...
