Abstrakt
This article is concerned with the notion of merged consciousness in Virginia Woolf's novels Mrs Dalloway and The Waves. Modernist authors were the first who turned the focus of fiction away from the descriptions of the external to the interest in the manifestations of the mental.
However, the authors started to use innovative narrative techniques, such as stream of consciousness, interior monologue or narrative polyphony to promote individual perspectives of reality. It is argued in the article that Virginia Woolf, on the contrary, uses these techniques to unify her characters and to emphasize the inseparability of all perceiving subjects.
Particularly in her novel The Waves, Woolf employs the concept of "merged consciousness" that connects simultaneous perspectives of the novel's characters and enables them to be co-conscious of the same objects, as if they were capable of one shared perception of reality integrated in the stream of superhuman consciousness. Moreover, the article aims to point out that Woolf's search for unity and wholeness is manifested not only in the way the author treats her characters, but also in the overall design of her novels and her "personal philosophy" substantially influenced by the scientific and philosophical theories characteristic of the turn of the 20th century.