Time in stories using stream-of-consciousness and self-talk techniques is very subjective and malleable. As Stephen Kern notes, realists may have used tense to help fill in plot and character details, but modernists took it to new levels, "to capture the way the mind extends erratically across the temporal spectrum” (113). “Kew Gardens” and “The Mark on the Wall” by Virginia Woolf. In “Kew Gardens,” descriptions of flowers and insects are interspersed with vignettes of people passing through the garden. Simon and Eleanor's conversation (a 180-degree reversal of Joyce's "The Dead," where a similar conversation involved a woman's memory of a former lover), for example, is followed by a long passage describing a snail moving from stem to stem. . The snail's progress is infinitesimally slow by human standards and requires a similar slowing down of the narrative at this point. The confusion indicates that the conversation and the natural phenomenon are equally important, even though the reader may be frustrated because humans interact....