Analysis of "Mark on the Wall"
... very ordered and defined. “The Archbishop of Canterbury is followed by the Archbishop of York” (2147). But in all actuality, the universe is exactly opposite. It’s only unifying aspect is that of chaos. It is not until the narrator fixes her eyes upon the mark on the wall, in all its uncertainties, that she feels “a satisfying sense of reality…” (2147). Reality can also be distorted. For instance, everyone has a picture in their mind of who they believe they are, but is this representation factual? “All the time I’m dressing up the figure of myself in my own mind, loving, stealthily… Indeed, it is curious how instinctively one protects the image of oneself from idolatry or any other handling that could make it ridiculous, or too unlike the original to be believed in any longer” (2145). If this reality each of us has created was to shatter, we would be left in “an airless, shallow, bald, prominent world…A world not to be lived in” (2145). A world of absolute truth, but we do not live in such a world. The narrator also shows the uncertainty of truth through the use of light. “In certain lights that mark on the wall seems actually to project from the wall” (2145). This statement suggests that truth is all in how you perceive it. Truth is not a solid concrete structure rooted to the very core of the earth; it is a modernistic painting with splashes of red and yellow, different to all who look upon it. Truth is the collection of facts in accordance with the accepted standards, but in a world where facts change, evolve, and can be manipulated is there truth? If so, it can only exist in the human mind, therefore the objectivity is lost. In doing so, the truth is destroyed. But is this such a bad thing? The narrator does not seem to think so. She speaks of those who have acquired knowledge as “descendants of witches and hermits who crouched in caves and in woods brewing herbs, interrogating shrew-mice and writing down the language of the stars…” (2146). What happens when people throw off these superstitions of knowledge? “[O]ur respect for beauty and health of mind increases…a very pleasant world” (2146). The narrator then goes on to think of trees and how they grow. She does not know the science/facts behind the growth, yet “[f]or years and years they grow…” (2147). The facts of how the tree grows are of no importance to see that the tree does grow. Woolf is showing that if there is truth in the growth of the tree, it is not in the facts of the growth but in one’s perception of the growth. Although Woolf’s speculations do not offer closure to the question of truth, they do, however, provide us with a starting point with which to reach our own conclusions. In her short story, “The Mark on the Wall,” Virginia Woolf examines the very essence of truth. She questions its existence in religion and its existence altogether. Woolf does not, however, answer these questions for us; that part is left for the reader to decide on his own. The German philosopher, classical scholar, critic of culture, Friedrich Nietzsche, defined truth to a T when he said: What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions; they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins (qtd. in Bartleby 2). Works Cited Aristotle. “Metaphysics.” Complete Works of Aristotle. 19...