Structure

"Street Haunting" is structured as a walk through the streets of London. It follows a loose narrative in which Woolf leaves her home in search of a pencil to purchase at the Strand. Along the way, she stops at multiple other locations to contemplate city life and the structure of consciousness. Because of Woolf's highly cerebral subject matter, however, the narrative is anything but linear; Woolf frequently lapses into fantasies and fabricated lives that occur beyond her immediate surroundings. Readers are often thrust into the past or catapulted into the future as they follow Woolf through the streets of London. This structure is reflective of Woolf's stream-of-consciousness style, in which she attempts to dramatize the inner workings of the mind through literature. Rather than subscribing to a linear narrative, Woolf is more concerned with how narratives of life are imagined, created, and ultimately turned into literature themselves...