I first read Jacob’s Room by Virginia Woolf in the summer of 2019. I was about to start my final semester of undergrad, and needed one more elective to complete my Literature Minor, so a friend and I took a summer cram course on World War I literature. The beauty of these cram courses is that they award a full three credit hours in only three weeks. The catch is that the schedule requires class five days a week for nearly four hours a day, and you still have to cover a semester’s worth of content in that time.
Despite the circumstance, I had a great professor, and the content was interesting enough to keep me engaged. My biggest grief was that we didn’t have enough time to discuss the assigned reading as much as I would have liked, since we covered 2-3 books a week, along with poems, short stories, and other sources. Of everything we read, Jacob’s Room left the strongest impression, and it’s haunted me from its place among Woolf’s other works on my shelf ever since.
For those unfamiliar, Jacob’s Room was published post-war in 1922, and loosely follows Jacob Flanders, a man passionate about classical culture, being forced to confront the reality of his world during WWI. I say loosely, because the novel is very experimental, written in stream of consciousness from the viewpoints of a variety of characters, contains no discernible plot and, its most notable attribute, features the titular character mainly through impressions or memories.
In 2019, I wrote about one particular passage that describes Jacob’s empty room:
Because Jacob is rarely present to give us direct information, the reader of Jacob’s Room has to endure the experience of gathering clues about him through the others’ observations or descriptions of environments he once inhabited. In dealing with the frustrations of analyzing a character that was rarely (if ever) present in their own narrative I wrote:
However, there is a feeling of dissatisfaction, because after a paragraph of lengthy descriptions… Jacob is not to be seen in the room, and all of the possessions the reader has begun to associate with him are, in a way, meaningless, because he is not there to be associated with them. The reader is given no interaction between Jacob and these objects; therefore, it is difficult to determine what Jacob’s relationship is with these items and ideas, and the final sentence resists any conclusion.
After our class finished with Jacob’s Room, I was still nagged by one recurring detail that had not appeared in any of my research or surfaced in any group discussions. At the end of the week, I walked with my professor back to her office, and we had this discussion:
Me: “Can you explain to me a little more about the recurring use of the color yellow in Jacob’s Room?”
Professor: “I’m not sure I know what you mean.”
Me: “You know, sometimes it’s used to describe a mood, sometimes a physical object, or an atmosphere.”
Professor: “I don’t think I’ve ever noticed that detail before.”
I couldn’t fully make sense of why the color yellow was so significant, but it was mentioned so frequently I knew it could be no mistake. At the time, I wrote that I believed the color yellow depicted fading beauty or tainted experiences, and noted a few examples of its appearance, such as being paired with the adjective “jaded,” or used to describe Jacob’s bedroom after a sobering event, a “yellow canopy” that “sinks and swells,” and light shining through the “yellow blinds.” To me, the color yellow was meant to usher in a new cynical way of viewing the world, even if its physicality had not completely changed.
As I was digging through old notes and looking at my annotations earlier this week, I found the conclusion I came to about Jacob’s Room, which was clearly influenced by the thematic overtones built into the structure of the course I was taking when I read it:
Jacob’s Room reveals two major ideas that Woolf will continue to revisit throughout the novel: the reality that the essence of a person can never be truly known, and the reality of World War I that will change the way society views itself, the war, and the world around it… a reality…that resists understanding, and instead leaves the world with fragmented narratives pieced together to leave impressions of its effects and existence.
I think this is a fair analysis, especially within Woolf’s context as a writer. However, as the years have past, I’ve found that subconsciously I began to view Jacob’s Room in a new light, one less reliant on the circumstances in which it was written and more open to what it means to be growing up.
Throughout the novel, some characters appear to be waiting for Jacob to return, while others have only crossed paths with him for a moment, but they picked up on something worth noting. Jacob himself is at the crux of adulthood, straddling the old reality of living carefree and following his passions and the new reality of the cruelty the world is capable of showing. When I read Jacob’s Room, I was a few months out from finishing my Bachelor’s, loosening my grip on the life I enjoyed as a young adult before shouldering the weight of independence.
In the years since, I have made new friends and lost touch with many others. I’ve moved states twice and had several different jobs. Along the way, I’ve left impressions for many, whether friends left in another state or a stranger I spoke to in the park. I’ve watched many I know get married, have children. I’m about to endure another election season. I lived through a global pandemic. I got my Masters. The world around me continues to shift and change, rewriting the reality I expect each day when I wake up, but I was oblivious to this when I was younger, a privilege I’m aware not many are afforded.
My physical copy of Jacob’s Room is a Dover Thrift Edition that I bought secondhand to save a few dollars. The pages were yellowed before it reached my hands, and inside the cover, the previous owner penned the name “Andrew Wright” in cursive. Throughout the book, there are annotations made in pencil that predate any of mine, though if you look closely, you can see that many of these I re-annotated in pen. It turns out, Andrew Wright and I might think a lot alike.
These annotations are the only impression of Andrew Wright I’ll ever have. If I went back and read it again, maybe I could piece together a rough sketch of Andrew based on the passages he found the most interesting. But it would be only a shadow of him, an impression to be cast in my own yellow light.
The past brings out my color yellow, but no longer do I associate this with something tainted. Now, yellow looks more sepia toned – it’s nostalgic, the dull pain of realizing that life is moving forward with us, there is no without. With some, we will have the opportunity to recount memories, with others, their presence stays a memory, and with many more, we’ll only cross paths briefly but long enough to gift an impression to one another. One day, all that will be left of me are the things I owned, the places I went, or the words I wrote. I hope they are enough.1
Listless is the air in an empty room, just swelling the curtain; the flowers in the jar shift. One fibre in the wicker arm-chair creaks, though no one sits there…
“What I am to do with these, Mr. Bonamy?”
She held out a pair of Jacob’s old shoes.
– Virginia Woolf, final words from Jacob’s Room
The cover image is from the Wall Street Journal article, “‘Jacob’s Room’: A Young Man Etched in Absence.”
This was so creative and fascinating Jordan! The manner in which your physical copy of the book reinforces the narrative in the story is powerful.
I have spent a great deal of time recently contemplating the ways in which we eventually leave earth, and those who actually know the content of our character and the most fundamental components of our nature will shortly join us. Though our lives feel so significant to us, in the grand scheme, we are unlikely to be remembered- even if we are incredibly accomplished. And so, it seems that everyone’s life eventually becomes Jacob’s room. A place of speculation and of attempting to piece together a fragmented narrative of who we were. But I wonder if we could even extend this analogy so far as to say that our observable behavior is a bit of a Jacob’s room as well. That only so much can be deduced about our internal state and cognition just based on the way that we act. That our behavior is just loose threads to a deeper and more complex system that takes place within. I know many people who would push back against that, but I think it is worth considering.