Detachment

     The one passage that stood out to me more than any other in Voyage in the Dark occurs on p. 31, when Anna is lying on her bed, unable to move. She sees a cockroach “waving its feelers slowly backwards and forwards,” and because she cannot move, she has no choice but to watch it and think. This whole situation, of course, is nearly identical to the experience of Virginia Woolf’s narrator in “A Mark on the Wall,” the difference being that we do not get the same kind of glance into Anna’s head as we do into the head of Woolf’s narrator.

     This parallel leads to a number of other conclusions, most significantly the realization that we never really see into Anna’s head except in moments of extreme duress (such as the moment on p. 162 after she discovers her pregnancy). Unlike Woolf’s narrator, we are quite detached from Anna’s everyday thoughts – hence the physical descriptions of individual characters, rather than observations on their personalities or other, more significant characteristics. Only when Anna is experiencing sufficient stress or emotion are we allowed into her real thoughts. All of this culminates in a fairly evident question: Do we trust Anna as a narrator if she’s not letting us into her head?