Fleas

Bull-fighting is first introduced into the novel amid a conversation between Jake and Cohn. After Cohn says that his “life is going so fast and [he’s] not really living it,” Jake reassures Cohn with the fact that  "Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bull-fighters." From this quote, it is clear that Jake holds admiration for bull-fighters, particularly because they live an exciting life that involves risk and adrenaline. Not only does this confirm that Jake is a fan of manly activities, but also that he admires a man who risks his life for something he has aficion for, much as he presumably did in the war. Later in the novel, it becomes clear that Jake doesn’t just admire bullfighters, he has serious aficion for the sport—the kind of aficion he’s missing out on because of his injury. It is particularly telling that as Jake does meaningless busy work to keep his mind off Brett, (and the fact that his injury keeps them from being together) he spends most ...

There two main instances in the novel where it seems that Woolf may be poking fun at how humans have a short attention span and need a constant distraction. Towards the beginning of the novel, a mysterious car drives through the street. News bounces around and people begin to speculate that it may be the queen or some other important figure—suddenly everyone’s day stops as they watch the car. Clarissa even begins to feel “extreme dignity” standing on the street, despite having no idea who is in the car. Then, suddenly, the crowd begins to notice an airplane flying overhead, which seems to be spelling something. Although they still have no idea what the airplane is spelling, all heads turn, and everyone is now fascinated by the plane, so much so that they barely notice the car drive past. To me, it seems that Woolf is trying to poke fun at the crowd as if to say that absolutely anything would distract the crowd (even if they can’t fully identify what is distracting them), and anyth...

Throughout the Mezzanine, it seems that most of the events of the lunch hour, the objects Howie sees along his way, and Howie's recollections from childhood aren’t spectacular or meaningful on their own until Howie’s enthusiasm and digressions make them seem so. For example, the narrator walks to buy a cookie, notices that urinals look like gargoyles, and remembers that his dad used to hang ties on doorknobs, none of which seem like irreplaceable ideas or events in the book; You could imagine that Baker would have had no trouble writing a book of 10 or 100 times the length of the Mezzanine—he wouldn’t run out of interesting things to notice or comment on. On a surface level, the choice of the escalator as the vehicle of the Mezzanine also seems like an arbitrary and insignificant choice by Baker. But after closer inspection, it appears that the escalator is intended as a metaphor, suggesting that Howie is not only rising to his office but also a different mental state with a ...