A young man's life during the early years of the twentieth century is examined through the eyes of those closest to him. As Jacob Flanders grows from childhood to adulthood, the events and people that influence his life are examined solely through the perspectives of others, leading to an incomplete understanding of who Jacob really is.
Thusly, although it could be said that the book is primarily a character study and has little in the way of plot or background, the narrative is constructed with a void in place of the central character if, indeed, the novel can be said to have a 'protagonist' in conventional terms.
Motifs of emptiness and absence haunt the novel and establish its elegiac feel. Jacob is described to us, but in such indirect terms that it would seem better to view him as an amalgam of the different perceptions of the characters and narrator. He does not exist as a concrete reality, but rather as a collection of memories and sensations.
Virginia Woolf's third novel, published in 1922, Jacob's Room is a character study that ponders how well any person can be known. Following the author's more conventional novels The Voyage Out and Night and Day, Jacob's Room is as an important modernist text, demonstrating Woolf's progression as a writer of modernist literature.