Elegy and the Unknowable Mind in Jacob’s Room

Focusing on Virginia Woolf’s 1922 novel Jacob’s Room, this paper uses a cognitive-theoretical approach to explicate how the novel produces the sensation that Jacob is an “unknowable” protagonist; in doing so, I address an ongoing debate in the critical literature on whether the elegiac construction of the text should be read sincerely or satirically. These two issues are linked and mutually enlightening: by analyzing Woof’s textual strategies in relation to cognitive-narratological work on cue inconsistency and source monitoring, we can clarify the elegiac impulse in the novel and obviate the sincere/satirical opposition constructed by critics. Ultimately, my analysis of Woolf’s compositional techniques suggests that Jacob’s Room is at once a sincere expression of bereavement and grief in the wake of the loss of life in World War I, as well as a critique of England’s educational, political, and social institutions.