Adjacency Pairs and Interactive Consciousness in Virginia Woolf’s Novels

This article responds to an important development in the study of the presentation of social minds by investigating Virginia Woolf’s portrayal of consciousness in the light of a key conversational pattern: adjacency pairs. Woolf employs frequent shifts in point of view in her texts, the result of which is that different characters’ streams of consciousness are interwoven together. This narrative design allows the text to probe into the relationship between different minds. Drawing on findings in discourse analysis, this article demonstrates that the way in which characters’ viewpoints are juxtaposed resembles paired actions in conversation and that the intersubjectivity underlying the format of adjacency pairs is also mapped on the juxtaposition of different minds. It thereby argues that this sequencing format functions as an effective linguistic mechanism for rendering the social interactive quality of consciousness in Woolf’s narrative.