Jake and His Insecure Masculinity

 From the beginning of this novel, up until this point, it’s apparent that Jake Barnes has a blatant “shyness” or insecurity of his masculinity, based on various factors within the book. At the beginning of the novel, even before the story begins, we are introduced to Jake’s past, him serving in the war, and sustaining an injury that, implied within the novel, suggests he is unable to have intercourse. This is hard to determine right away from Jake, as his nature is to hint at ideas and scenarios rather than openly discuss them. Moreover, on his insecurity, Lady Brett Ashley’s refusal to enter a relationship with him, due to his injury, severely impacts his presumption about himself, since it means giving up sexual intercourse for her. Furthermore, Jake’s hostility towards Robert Cohn is more than likely founded within his own insufficient feelings. Overall, Jake seems to be heavily affected from his injury and the war, which affects his decisions, beliefs and hopes on topics such as love, morality, etc. , and this is presented multiple times within the novel, as Jake is a bar-wanderer, drinking nights away in Paris. Contrary to first thought, Jake actually recognizes his actions and understands ideas and measures on how to remedy them, as he mentioned to Cohn in Chapter 2, “You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another.” It seems likely that Jake is just unwilling or unable at the time to fix his issues faced in his life, and this could be due to the overall immense stress placed on him for each of the obstacles he faces.

Compare and Contrast Novels

 After reading both The Mezzanine and Mrs. Dalloway, it’s evident that there’s a key similarity between the two: the usage of time and how this conveys elements of the stories of each to us as readers. Taking a look at the use of time, it is noticeable that this factor of literature and how it’s manipulated and shown in both The Mezzanine and Mrs. Dalloway is interesting and develops key ideas and summaries on both of the books we read in class so far. Both novels occur over very short periods of time, The Mezzanine being told over the course of the narrator walking to the mezzanine of his office after lunch and Mrs. Dalloway over one day in Clarissa Dalloway’s everyday life. In both of these pieces of literature, it’s really interesting to understand how an entire novel with plot and detail can be told over such a short period of time. 

    A primary contrast between the two novels must be the perspective(s) of which both novels are using. In the Mezzanine, the narrator, Howie, is able to take in his surroundings and transform them to an extent of using the “white background” trick to implement detail into average, everyday life, making the flow of the novel both bizarre and appealing. Baker’s style is clear and evident in The Mezzanine because of the fact that Howie is the only perspective shown within the novel, thus Baker can manipulate many aspects of Howie’s ideas in a clear and concise manner without mixing up other character’s thoughts and ideas. 

However, in Mrs. Dalloway, there’s a different idea and flow to the novel. Virginia Woolf uses multiple perspectives of each character to provide insight to each person’s perspective on Clarissa Dalloway. While this format may provide a limited amount of heightened detail to be explored, like The Mezzanine, the use of multiple perspectives is also beneficial to the audience to understand the many viewpoints on Clarissa, and allows us as the reader to compare and contrast the lives of other characters within the book. For example, when we are introduced to Septimus, we can easily compare that he, like Clarissa, is not living his life and is consumed by his own inner thoughts about evil in the world around him. Clarissa, on the other hand, has many questions about life, ideas concerning her own and others’ lives around her.  The fact that each of the characters in Mrs. Dalloway have their own lives and thoughts really brings them to life instead of painting them as just background characters or “extras”, like in The Mezzanine as we don’t really get to explore any other character other than Howie. 

Overall, both these novels achieve a great exploration of the key ideas used within them, and each author details this extremely well through the usage of these elements in their literature.