COVE

In Virginia Woolf's first publication "The Mark on the Wall," she spends the entire story tracing back memories to figure out what the mark on the wall is. She ponders what this mark could be; for instance she questions if the mark on the wall was made from a hole or not, or if it is shadow being projected. By thinking about what the mark on the wall actually is, the narrator goes down many rabbit holes within her brain, where she has thoughts of death and how fast life seems to go by, or she thinks of things such as nature and Shakespeare. At the end of this story, another individual stops by and speaks with the narrator, saying they will go out to get a newspaper, and then the narrator recalls how they mentioned that the mark on the wall was actually a snail. After all the thinking this narrator does, the mark on the wall only turns out to be a mere snail after all. This feels mere because of all the thinking the narrator did, as she put emphasis on why it couldn't be a hole in the wall. With this writing, it illustrates common thoughts humans may have, and the art of thinking is an aspect of humanity. We all occasionally get distracted by thoughts that have nothing to do with a task we have at hand, and Virginia Woolf is pointing this out through her story. 

Mhy. Snail Shell Slow. 2014. Pixabay, https://pixabay.com/photos/snail-snail-shell-slow-animal-405384/.

Woolf, Virginia. "The Mark on the Wall." The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries, edited by Stephen Greenblatt, et al., Eleventh ed., vol. F, W.W. Norton, 2012, pp.278-282.