"... the silence, the emptiness, the melancholia ..."

No one (at this point in the class, at least) can miss the significance of the opening of Chapter 2: "There was something extraordinarily real and at the same time unreal in the sights and sounds and smells ... and this curious mixture of intense reality and unreality applied to all my seven years in Ceylon" (21). Once again, like Conrad, Woolf probes the nature of reality, and by extension the nature of consciousness and of experience itself and the very faculties with which we apprehend/comprehend the world. The fact that the Woolf prefaces his own arrival in Sri Lanka in such uncertain terms underscores his own anxiety at being displaced from not only his home, but from the familiar structures of knowledge production and meaning making. In being pushed to the very fringes of the Empire Woolf finds it almost necessary to undertake the ontological questioning that is at the heart of his memoirs. This line of questioning undercuts the solipsism that is so intrinsic to the "I" of the autobiography, and the centre cannot hold. Much of the chapter is a reorientation, in every sense of the word, in a foreign country, but just as Woolf is getting comfortable in Jaffna, his brief posting to Mannar unsettles him once again, besieging him with sleepless nights.

Thus, modernism was not just a fictional strategy; it also allowed for the interrogation of autobiographical self, and for the crystallization of the anxieties of the colonizer, as Woolf came to see colonial superfluity and futility in Sri Lanka. One is left to consider (as does Leonard himself, undoubtedly) what might have happened if he did marry Gwen, and it in is this subtle yet palpable ponderation of the autonomy of the individual against the social script that Woolf does not simply address a growing disaffection towards the colonial enterprise, but mounts a redress of the self and society, and how the latter impinges on the former.