Interpetive Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Interpetive - Essay Example In the beginning, the streets of London are represented by Woolf as amazingly pleasing and interesting to people. Walking around the city of London arouses the imaginations and discoveries of identity where people are unbound to shortly become â€Å"a nomad wandering the desert, a mystic staring at the sky, a debauchee in the slums of San Francisco, a soldier heading a revolution, a pariah howling with skepticism and solitude† (Woolf 3). This sense of liberty and independence while walking the streets of London somehow manages to merge the individual identity of the narrator to those of the passing crowd. The narrator is simply carried away by the exquisiteness and magnificence of the city that dissolves any form of her hang-up into a â€Å"central oyster of perceptiveness† (Woolf 1). Her character then becomes identity-less as she absorbs the color and light of the city roads. But when the door shuts on us, all that vanishes. The shell-like covering which our souls hav e excreted to house themselves, to make fro themselves a shape distinct from others, is broken, and there is left of all these wrinkles and roughness a central oyster of perceptiveness, an enormous eye. How beautiful a street is in winter. (Woolf 1) In addition, the freedom that the modern city of London offers to the narrator allows her to lose herself in the crowd, and thus discovers herself inquiring about the everyday life of a dwarf (reference)? This event of losing oneself while exploring the streets of modern London is the fundamental reason that haunts the narrator. As she walks around the city, she witnesses different disturbing realities: a dwarf woman, two blind men, a retard, and the limping ludicrous dance of â€Å"the humped, the twisted, and the deformed† (Woolf 2). These realities have brought deep thinking to the narrator that makes her feel so lost in the modern world. The monstrosities that the narrator has witnessed and the beauty that she has experienced shake her identity and left her unstable. All the way through the narration of Wolf in her essay â€Å"Street Haunting† this feeling of uncertain identity is stressed out by referring to her narrator as â€Å"we† instead of â€Å"I†: â€Å"We shall never know† (Woolf 4) and â€Å"We are no long quite ourselves† (Woolf 1). The very instance of the narrator stepping out her door and into the modern city of London immediately strips off her individuality for anonymity. She can no longer identify herself with the different oddities and, at the same time, beauty that she is witnessing around the streets of modern London. The narrator becomes estranged to herself because she cannot connect anymore to the outside world that is entirely different to her inside world. Indeed, the various technological advances and behavioral changes brought by the rapid modernization of the London’s society highly contribute to the new definition and understanding of mobility, communication, time, and speed. Contrastingly, these advances and changes have also expanded the modern London outside the limits of coherent perception making the city unfathomable and too intricate for people to figure out. The enormity of the modern society and how it has become incomprehensible is repeatedly expressed in the essay. The narrator’s encounter at the second-hand bookstore conveys how she finds it