At this time, nearly everyone has some experience with the internet, the worldwide network of computers. The World Wide Web (WWW) is a household term. one of the architectural benefits of the WWW is the ability of the user to jump from place to place in a non-linear pattern in what seems like an instance. The ability to transefer information half way around the planet in seconds was nothing short of a dream 75 years ago.
Virginia Woolf used non-linear patterns in her piece Mrs. Dalloway. a novel that tells of a woman and her party. It begins in the morning as the preparations are being made and it ends in the late evening as the guests are all going leaving. It also tells of a war veteran and his loss of sanity. There are many flashbacks used to tell the past of each character, but the book still never leaves the scope of those few hours.
Woolf could have just placed all the flashbacks of Mrs. Dalloway in the beginning, and eliminated the need for flashbacks entirely. There could have just been a section in the beginning that would have encompassed all the information that was told otherwise through the story. Woolf, however, was experimenting with her tunnelling idea. In her diary she wrote:
"It took me a year's groping to discover what I call my tunnelling process, by which I tell the past by installments, as I have need of it. This is my prime discovery so far, and the fact that I've been so long finding it, proves, I think, how false Percy Lubbock ' s doctrine is - that you can do this sort of thing consciously"
As the story begins, the reader is introduced to Clarissa and some of her present life. The more time that is spent with her, the more one learns, both through the present day and the flashbacks. But all info gleaned from the flashbacks is from Clarissa's point of view. From a distance one can see Clarissa, and as one reads on, the "cave" that holds her past is explored
Later in the book, Peter, whom the reader only knows through Clarissa"s memories, appears. The reader is forced to look at him in a different light, along with his view of Clarissa. The reader, in this transition, follows Peter out and through London as he remembers the past.
These flashbacks continue through the entire novel, over 50 in total, and are obviously not linear in structure. This non-linear pattern is very web like in structure with many characters on the edges that all come together in the middle. The idea was "that the caves shall connect, and each comes to daylight at he present moment," which happens to be at the party.
In her essay entitled "Modern Fiction", Woolf comments on the conventions of her time that exist in the world of fiction writing. In one of her most famous quotes, she wrote:
"Look within and life, it seems, is very far from being "like this". Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions-trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall,as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls on differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but there... Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; but a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end."
She recognizes that most people don't think in the same pattern that most novels of her time were written in. There needn't be a symetical and geometric shape in fiction. The WWW is similiar in arrangement to "a luminous halo."
Along with a similiar method of traversing through the story, Woolf also alters the perception of time. Although the story starts around 10 am and ends a little after 3 am, about 17 hours, there is no concrete version of time. The "leaden circles" formed by the chime of Big Ben are noticed throughout the story, but Woolf does not wish to measure the story by real time, rather experiencal time. Peter can walk 2 and 1/2 miles in 10 minute while Clarissa"s thoughts of the past can be contained in 10 pages but take only moments in the story.
Since the passing of real time is not the goal in "Mrs. Dalloway", I have decided to also leave it out of this time line. Thus there is a non-linear time line that ignores time, thanks to Woolf for being so far ahead of her time.