Six characters babble themselves into existence through drone notes of internal monologue. But their placement in a chorus dooms them to the back of the stage, one and one and one all in unison to make a joint chord, only able to describe the action happening in the drama outside of themselves. They are desperate to create and to become but the undulating nature of their mind voices can’t help but join together in a song sung for those who cohabit the world with them. And like every song that we sing for long enough, this one has a tendency to become a lamenting threnody.

This book is an experimental reaction to Realism, but unlike other reactions to the Real that zoom their cameras out to the grand stage of nature or aloof mythology, Woolf zooms us to the atomic scale of the soul. Characters “say” every line of this book but it becomes clear early on that we are being treated to the scattered phrases and half-hazed images that make up the deep strata of their own conscious. And those consciousnesses bleed into each other like waves experiencing brief illusions of selfhood atop a roiling collective ocean.

Like all of us, there are times when the characters become aware of their own dissipation into the milieu. They fight for identity through creation but ultimately their stories are only the great big story, this one. They are perhaps not even brief players on the stage—just choral singers hidden from the audience’s view. Their trauma forces them to sing a song of lamentation that sounds so much like the aimless guilt that we feel when someone we know passes before their time.

I once heard the phrase “‘person’ is a posthumous term,” and if that’s true then perhaps it can help us decode why it can feel like we are stuck here for so long after the rapture struggling to piece our identities together after we lose someone who seemed more alive than we’ve ever felt ourselves to be.