SOURCE: "The Dialectic of Time in Orlando," in College English, Vol. 24, No. 1, October, 1962, pp. 35-41.

In the following essay, German and Kaehele examine Woolf's presentation of "the dialectic of time" in Orlando.

Signs of the twentieth century's preoccupation with time can be readily discerned in the frequency with which the modern novel develops a dialectic between the ephemeral and the enduring. Virginia Woolf's Orlando is an illustration, although a somewhat unconventional one, of this concern, for it examines "the two forces which alternately, and what is more confusing still, at the same moment, dominate our unfortunate numbskulls-brevity and diuturnity." A fantastic and farcical variant of such family novels as The Way of All Flesh and The Forsyte Saga, Orlando traces through more than three centuries a protagonist whose life is loosely based upon the careers of various members of the Sackville family. In following Orlando through such an...