The Haunting Ghost of Jacob Flanders : Revealing War Trauma Through the Aesthetics of Absence in Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room (1922)

This paper argues that Jacob's Room addresses trauma through the ghostly figure of Jacob Flanders. I contend that the author breaks conventional narrative techniques by relying on the aesthetics of absence to portray a character who is never completely known to the readers and haunts the text through the uncanny traces he leaves behind. In doing so, Woolf uses absence as a substitute for the failure of language to translate the horror of war. In its elegiac essence, the narrative can be considered not only evidence of war trauma but also an experimental work of personal and cultural mourning.... Mehr ...