Difference Between Woolf and Joyce

It is probably first important for you to know that I'm an English Literature major, and am going through my very last semester. I'm taking a Senior Seminar in Virginia Woolf, and am currently preparing/brainstorming for my final paper. Right now I'm comparing Woolf's "Jacob's Room" and Joyce's "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man". This is all just my opinion, and my attempt to navigate my way through complex and often convoluted modernist text.

Although Virginia Woolf and James Joyce share the medium of modernist text, their stylistic strategies differ. While Woolf employs methods such as exposing the sub-conscious thoughts of her characters, and breaking gender barriers, Joyce brings his characters out with heavy symbolism and poetic verse among his prose. "Jacob's Room" has so many characters in it that it is almost impossible to keep track of each, as well as their relations to each other. Woolf has a habit of keeping her characters distant from the reader, but this is infuriating because even though the reader (in this case me) has access to the thoughts of the characters, I leave the novel feeling more confused than ever.

If I have access to someone's thoughts, I would assume I would know more about them. Joyce does not allow us such direct access to Dedalus's thoughts, but through his poetic way of describing his experiences I get to know him better than I do any of Woolf's characters in "Jacob's Room". We seem to be jumping the years with Jacob, while with Dedalus we have more time to digest the change that occurs as he grows into adulthood.

I definitely think that I prefer Joyce's style of writing; even though I am unsure of what the symbolic text points towards sometimes, at least there is usually a clear indication of what it is related to. With Woolf sometimes there are passages that seem to just be suspended in air by themselves, with no connection to anything else that just happened in the novel. Specifically in Jacob's room Woolf often stops to describe things going on in nature. Why is this important? How does this relate to Jacob and everyone else in his life? My frustration levels rise as I read Woolf, because I know there is so much to take in but I don't even know where to begin.