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영어

This essay aims at examining how the trauma related to time is shown artistically in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. The themes regarding ‘time’ have been widely used by a lot of modernist writers including Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Marcel Proust. However, most topics are focused on the subjective time based on the stream of consciousness instead of approaching the ‘being of temporality.’ The ‘temporality of time’ has the characteristics of being both undecidable and variable so that it tends to result in the ‘trauma’ that has not been discussed not publicly until recently. Therefore it is needed that how the ‘being of temporality’ and how it brings about ‘trauma’ can be shown in the literary works. When we talk about the topics of trauma in Woolf’s work, we usually pull out the discussions on ‘sexual abuse’ or ‘shell-shock’ especially in Mrs. Dalloway. Woolf has the outstanding capacity to depict how the connection between ‘being of ephemerality’ and ‘trauma’ is represented through the work while creating the main characters like Septimus Smith and Clarissa Dalloway in Mrs Dalloway. Septimus is the key exemplar to show the main ideas about the ‘post-traumatic stress disorder’ namely ‘PTSD’ through his unavoidable suicide. Clarissa also plays an important role to explain her own identity as ‘being of temporality.’ In conclusion, ‘being of temporality’ comes to us as a state of strangeness, making us realize both the essence of being in the present and trauma.