Although war haunts the two authors in very different ways, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce concur on one fundamental point: they both endeavour to expose the ideological forces that divide people and prepare them to accept conflicts, with all their injustice and barbarity. Boys and young men in particular are taught to order and obey, to thrive on antagonism and self-identify through opposition to other groups. Drawing from the descriptions of Stephen’s and Jacob’s education in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Jacob’s Room, I will analyse how this subterranean yet pervasive influence is handled in both novels. As a matter of fact, from a very similar starting point, I will argue that the interactions which Joyce and Woolf choose to depict, and in particular the way in which their protagonists react to social pressures, beckon them in different directions. Faced with a war-torn Europe and a battered, divided Ireland, their denunciation of pre-war society highlights distinct artistic and social voices as poles of resistance, and these in turn underlie their stance towards reconstruction, on a personal as well as political plane.