20th Cent Elias

      Woah, it's the last post of the quarter. For this one I'm gonna tone down the seriousness and talk about time period. So, reading this book I've noticed a couple of weird details that have done an effective job at completely disorienting me. I know the book itself was made in 1926, but as for the setting of the story, I'm at a loss. I'll try my best to explain what I mean. So on the opening page, Jake introduces Cohn by letting us know that he was the middleweight boxing champion at Princeton. Now, this is totally baseless and I'm aware of that, but when I hear things like "middleweight boxing" and "Princeton" my brain automatically thinks of a relatively modern setting. I'm not very good with History (as you'll come to know better and better the more you read), but my weakest of weak points is reasoning when certain things were invented. To me, something like a middleweight category in boxing seems like something that wouldn...

      So for my third blog post, I wanted to look at the character Septimus, since he was generally the character most difficult for me to understand. Reading the passages describing the inner workings of his head, often left me lost and confused as to what his character's message was. In this post I'm not going to attempt to explain that message (since I don't think I fully understand it even now), but instead I want to talk about the way mental health issues were presented in the book, as well as the parallels one can observe in real life.      First up, I want to talk about how Septimus is viewed by others. In Mrs. Dalloway we are given a glimpse of Septimus from both the eye of a passerby and the eye of a "doctor." Peter Walsh, our passerby, sees Septimus and Rezia in the park, during the middle of one of Septimus' episodes and dismisses it as a quarrel between two young lovers. Peter formulates his take on a couple seconds and a glance with no other in...