To the Lighthouse

To the Lighthouse is the one of most experimental works of V. Woolf. The book is divided into three
parts: The Window, Time Passes and The Lighthouse, with the tremendous focus on the first and the
third. The events of a single afternoon constitute over half the book, while the events of the following
ten years are compressed into a few dozen pages. The narrator speaks in the third person selected
omniscient giving us an insight into the characters’ feelings. The narrative switches constantly from the
perceptions of one character to those of the next. In the dinner party sequence, for instance, Woolf
changes the point of view frequently, with transitions often marked by the sparse dialogue. By shifting
the point of view from character to character, Woolf shares each character’s thoughts and feelings,
memories, opinions and reactions to one another. The light dialogue serves to break up the transitions in
perspective. By blending people’s inward feelings and keeping dialogue to a minimum, Woolf develops
her multi-dimensioned characters in a unique way. The enveloping and interpenetrating effects of
multiple consciousnesses are achieved through author’s radical uses of indirect speech and of indirect
interior monologue, in which the narrative consciousness speaks through the mental language of its
characters, without becoming wholly identified with it.

The temporality of To the Lighthouse is that of two days separated by a gap or passage of ten years. The
passage of time is modulated rather by the consciousness of the characters than by the clock. The title of
the novel suggests its dual temporality and status as a elegy and as quest-narrative- ‘to’ the lighthouse.
The author turned to the new scientific theories of time, space and relativity to explore the complex
workings of memory and of memory traces which have both spatial and temporal aspects. Woolf also
constructs a ‘passage’ in the novel through which the past travels to the present and vice versa. This
passage is of profound importance; it is given spatial form and temporal duration. In the central section
Time Passes, she explores the passage between experience and representation; the passage is also a
corridor along which Mr. Ramsay stumbles after Mrs. Ramsay’s death.

In the first part of the novel, The Window, the Ramsay family and assorted guests are depicted during a
day on the Hebridean island which is their summer home. In the centre section Time Passes, Mr.
Ramsay dies and the First World War fractures history and reality, In this part, the passage of ten years
is also the passing of one night, from the midnight hour when the lights are extinguished to the breaking
of dawn and of the veil of the sleepers’ eyes. Because of the absence of plot in the second part, the
author produces a form of experimental cine-play, the space of the narrative is replaced by using visual
images, to express emotions and animating objects into non-human life; it is the image of the empty
summer home of Ramsey family, a sinking house, fallen into degradation.
In the final section, The Lighthouse, Lily completes a painting whose vision had formerly eluded her;
and Mr. Ramsay with his two youngest children, James and Cam, reach the lighthouse, having finally
made the journey planned with the first words of the novel.

In the third part of the novel, the Ramsay family return to the house, thus there is no returning to the old
forms. The Lighthouse is a continual process of negotiation with the pat, not a reliving of it. The
narrative moves outside the house, shifting between Lily painting on the lawn and Mr. Ramsay, James
and Cam sailing to the lighthouse. Her can be observed a modernist simultaneity which breaks with the
conventions of linear form. It also provides a link between the double vision: the doubling of
thought(Lily’s and Cam’s), the duality of sea and shore, art and life, past and present, the ideal and the
real, experience(Mr. Ramsay’s arrival at the lighthouse rock) and representation(Lily’s painting). In the
final section of the novel, the multiple perspectives and eye lines of The Window are reduced to a
narrower range of vision, alternating between the view from the boat to the island shore and then the
lighthouse rock and the view of the boat from the island shore. In the final section of the novel, Woolf
depicts James, Cam and Lily remembering, repeating and working-through memory and loss.
In “Time Passes,” Woolf breaks from her traditional literary form to forge a new consciousness for
society and introduces the typographical device of the square bracket to write from the point-of-view of
an objective outsider. Woolf employs a type of contrast by giving no further explanation of how Mrs.
Ramsey’s died, the author put the death of Mrs. Ramsey in square brackets, which punctuate the second
and third section of the novel. At one level, the bracketing of those elements which traditionally form
the substance of stories and the giving-over of the narrative to no-narrative events, such as the passing
of time and the decay of matter, is a conscious reversal of the priorities and the preoccupations of the
conventional novel. The words between the brackets become more significant, framed by the brackets as
if by a window. The author is also laconic about the death of young men in war, and among them
Andrew Ramsay and also about the death of Prue in childbirth. The second part reveals the destructive
power of the objective time.

The novel is above all about looking, perspective, distance, its organization an extraordinary complex
interplay of eye lines and sight lines. There is no definite truth, each character has his or her own truth
which reader can surprise across the transparency of another look. The consciousness of each serves a
kind of mirror-function. Lily’s painting is of Mrs. Ramsay and James, though it is abstract: the mother-
and-child pairing is conventionally coded for William Bankes and for Mr. Ramsay, for whom it
becomes an image, an illustration of a tenderness and of a vulnerability which demands his protection.

To the Lighthouse exemplifies Woolf’s style and many of her concerns as a novelist. Woolf was explicit
about the autobiographical dimension of the novel, she clearly stated that To the Lighthouse was about
her parents. With its characters based on her own parents and siblings, the novel is certainly Woolf’s
most autobiographical fictional statement, and with the characters like Mrs. Ramsay, Mr. Ramsay, and
Lily Briscoe, Woolf offers some of her most penetrating explorations of the workings of the human
consciousness as it perceives and analyzes, feels and interacts. The tone of the novel is elegiac, poetic,
rhythmic, imaginative, its language is dense and the structure amorphous. Compared with the plot-
driven Victorian novels that came before it, To the Lighthouse seems to have little in the way of action,
almost all of the events take place in the characters’ minds.

Mrs. Ramsay - Mr. Ramsay’s wife. A beautiful and loving woman, Mrs. Ramsay is a wonderful
hostess who takes pride in making memorable experiences for the guests at the family’s summer home
on the Isle of Skye. Affirming traditional gender roles wholeheartedly, she lavishes particular attention
on her male guests, who she believes have delicate egos and need constant support and sympathy. She is
a dutiful and loving wife but often struggles with her husband’s difficult moods and selfishness.
Mr. Ramsay - Mrs. Ramsay’s husband, and a prominent metaphysical philosopher. Mr. Ramsay loves
his family but often acts like something of a tyrant. He tends to be selfish and harsh due to his persistent
personal and professional anxieties. He fears, more than anything, that his work is insignificant in the
grand scheme of things and that he will not be remembered by future generations.
Lily Briscoe - A young, single painter who befriends the Ramsay’s on the Isle of Skye; like Mr.
Ramsay, Lily is plagued by fears that her work lacks worth. She begins a portrait of Mrs. Ramsay at the
beginning of the novel but has trouble finishing it. The opinions of men like Charles Tansley, who
insists that women cannot paint or write, threaten to undermine her confidence.
James Ramsay - The Ramsay’s youngest son, James loves his mother deeply and feels a murderous
antipathy toward his father, with whom he must compete for Mrs. Ramsay’s love and affection. At the
beginning of the novel, Mr. Ramsay refuses the six-year-old James’s request to go to the lighthouse,
saying that the weather will be foul and not permit it; ten years later, James finally makes the journey
with his father and his sister Cam. By this time, he has grown into a willful and moody young man who
has much in common with his father, whom he detests.