Reflections on "Monday or Tuesday"
Today I want to share my reflections on an unusal short story, Monday or Tuesday, written by my favorite writer: Virginia Woolf (the text is available on line). The short story has been published in 1921 and reflects Woolf's initial experiments with a completely new writing style, best known as stream of consciousness. Monday or Tuesday by Virginia Woolf is a very brief short story, just one page, that she published in 1921 when she was experimenting the Post Impressionist theories of her friend Roger Fry. It is the story of one heron “lazy and indifferent … (that) passes over the church” (Woolf 36). The next scenes present “a lake,” “a mountain” and then “wheels,” omnibuses,” men’s feet and women’s feet,” Miss Thingummy,” and “home or not home” before concluding with the same image of the heron returning from his flight. The challenge for the reader is to make sense of all these apparently scattered images by flying together with the heron. “The logic is deliberatively evasiv...