Similarities Between Love Medicine And Virginia Woolf

To some, meeting death may be more preferable to what they’re dealing with in their daily lives. Such is the case for some of the characters in both Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich, as well as the protagonists of Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. Both novels are set in clearly divergent environments, yet they are woven together with the common thread of how mortality takes a toll on the psyche and how the thought of death is something that is constantly lingering in day-to-day life. Taking a moment to pick apart these works of literature, it’s clear how they both take on this very human topic in differing ways. Love Medicine and Mrs. Dalloway individual handle death, and at the same time can come together to juxtapose how someone can either
He recounts how Henry had jumped into the river and never reemerged. “‘My boots are filling,’ He says this in a normal voice like he just noticed, and he doesn’t know what to think of it. Then he’s gone.” (Erdrich) This just goes to show how ambiguous death can be made and how with some instances of death, you can’t necessarily tell what an individual’s intention was. It’s up to the reader to tell, from this character’s point of view, whether his brother's death was a suicide. All which was made clear is how it was a seemingly casual self-destructive act. As a branch goes by which he could have held onto, his body does not emerge from the water. As a survivor, Lyman must then learn to cope with the death of his brother. He’s almost in a catatonic state where “he has sunk to a place so low that he is unable to move from it.”
Dalloway, especially for Clarissa, and Septimus and this awareness makes even mundane events and interactions meaningful, sometimes perhaps even threatening. Clarissa is a middle-aged female who has experienced the deaths of her father, mother, as well as her sister and has lived through the calamity which was then known as the great war. “Clarissa is a misfit within her social class since, although there are several references in the book to her snobbery, she nevertheless comes to an understanding during the novel that happiness cannot be measured simply by one's position in society but rather by an ability to see beauty in the mundane and the ordinary,”(Kimber) Due to all of this she has grown to believe that even living is dangerous since death may always be right around the