In “The Mark on the Wall,” a narrator is led into associative musings from speculating about the mark, only to discover, with deflating irony, that the source of the imaginative ramblings is in reality a lowly snail (with the further concluding ironic reversal being an unexpected reference toWorldWar I, whose seriousness undercuts the narrator’s previous whimsical free associations).

The ability of the imagination, a key repeated word inWoolf’s short stories, to perceive accurately the surrounding world is an issue in many of the stories. The simultaneity and differing angle of the three perspectives are suggested by the narrative refrain that closes each section, a sentence referring to Miranda jumping upright and exclaiming that she will be late for tea. Differing perspectives, which are almost cinematic or painterly, also structure “In the Orchard,” as each of the story’s three sections, dealing with a woman named Miranda sleeping in an orchard, focuses on, in order, the sleeping Miranda in relation to her physical surroundings, the effect of the physical surroundings on Miranda’s dreaming (and thus the interconnection between imagination and external world), and finally a return to the physical environment, with a shift in focus to the orchard’s apple trees and birds. Similar contrasts inform the two paragraphs describing the blue and green aspects of reality and the feelings associated with them in “Blue and Green.” These two colors are dominant and symbolic throughout Woolf’s short stories. In “Monday or Tuesday,” a series of contrasts between up and down, spatially free timelessness (a lazily flying heron) and restrictive timeliness (a clock striking), day and night, inside and outside, present experience and later recollection of it conveys the ordinary cycle of life suggested by the title and helps capture its experiential reality, the concern expressed by the refrain question that closes the second, fourth, and fifth paragraphs: “and truth?” In two short avant-garde pieces-“Monday or Tuesday” (six paragraphs) and “Blue and Green” (two paragraphs, one for each color)-Woolf attempts to convey the reality of the urban and natural worlds through discrete, apparently disconnected associative impressions.

Perhaps related to her mental condition is Virginia Woolf’s ( 25 January 1882 – 28 March 1941) interest in perception and perspective, as well as their relationship to imagination, in many stories.

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