SOURCE: Cyr, Marc D. “A Conflict of Closure in Virginia Woolf's ‘A Mark on the Wall.’” Studies in Short Fiction 33, no. 2 (spring 1996): 197-205.

In the following essay, Cyr explores the meaning of the mark in “The Mark on the Wall” and debates the sense of closure in the story.

Virginia Woolf's “The Mark on the Wall” concludes with the identification of that mark as a snail, this after several pages of digressions—on history, reality, society, art, writing, and life itself—incited by the flimsy ruse of an ontological inquiry. Readers have reacted variously to this revelation: As T. E. Apter notes, some, like M. C. Bradbrook, have found it “exasperating” (54), while others have found the “cruelly disappointing” (Guiguet 217) or “trivial” (Apter 54) or “insignificant” (Gorsky 51) nature of the mark to be important to understanding that Woolf is proposing that objective reality is less important than the world of...