Prez, Juan Cruz The Subjective Quest for the Meaning of Life in To the Lighthouse

British born writer Virginia Woolf can be considered the embodiment of Modernism in English literature for her craftsmanship at constructing stories by innovative means and by focusing on the psychological lives of her characters. Although not formally educated, Woolf dwelt her whole life among literate groupsher family house as a child and, later in life, the Bloomsbury Group. This constant contact with the intellectuals of her times gave her the tools to develop her own style in writing and also contributedas well as her traumatic childhood experiencesto the analysis of modern life reflected in her oeuvre. In her 1927 To the Lighthouse, Woolf set her characters to search for the meaning of life by their own means, and to reflect on their psychological digressions to achieve the quest. By means of the stream of consciousness techniquein which the thoughts of the different characters are put to paper in their crude form, without the editorial intromission of the author or the narratorthe author effortlessly displays the mental undergoing of Mr Ramsay, Mrs Ramsay, and Lily Briscoe in their own particular ways to achieve their vision of what life is about. To the Lighthouse consists of three chapters which in turn contain numbered sections within them. In the first chapterThe Windowthe author tells what goes on at the Ramsays summer house during one afternoon, and what the charactersthe family and its guestshappen to be thinking during this time. In the second partTime Passesthe focus changes from the inner life of the characters to what happens in a tenyear period to the decaying summer house and the tragedies that affect to the Ramsey family and their guests in The Window. Finally, in the last chapterThe Lighthousethe author retells the return of the remaining Ramseys and two of their guests to the location of the first part and how they, in different levels, finally achieve their visions of fail to do so. Regarding Mr Ramseys search for the answer of lifes meaning, we can see that the path he follows is marked for his own philosophical empiricism which acquired through his works as a philosopher. He is constantly searching the elusive Z in the continuum of thinking that he sees as an alphabet running from A through Z. He admits that thanks to his thinking process he has gone so far as to reach Q, but even reaching to R seems to him a task that he is not prepared to achieve. At the end of the novel, while travelling in the boat to the lighthouse he realizes that probably the path

Prez, Juan Cruz follow by her late wifethat of the feelingswas a more convenient way to reach to the Z, that at that time has became his way to represent the ultimate knowledge about life. This realization is probably the reason he praises James when arriving to the lighthouse of the job he has done at sailing the boat. The aforementioned Mrs Ramsey takes a different path to find the meaning of life. In contrast to his husband, she decides to be guided by her feelings to achieve the underlying understanding of existence. All the visitors to the summer house tend to agree to different degrees that the lady of the house is a being that thrives in human emotions. She finds herself during most of the first chapter arranging marriages among their guests, and most importantly soothing his husband ego, encouraging her offspring aspirations, and comforting his little sonsJamesemotions. Although she seemingly finds the answer to the meaning of life during the first chapter, in Time Passes the reader comes to realize that her effect on others resulted rather negative, with marriages resulting in poor relationships, and the death of two of her children. Finally, the third character that most evidently looks for her vision of life is the young artist Lily Briscoe. As a painter, she, in a way, synthesises both outlooks of life of the Ramsey couple. On the one hand she deals with her own emotions and tries to understand others feelings and at the same time intends to reflect the empiric reality in her art. Her quest is cut short in The Window as she is not able to finish her painting of the joyous landscaping of the summer house with all its guests. In The Lighthouse she starts afresh with a new painting and while doing it, she starts to reflect in the different paths followed by the Ramseys, and how each of them affected not only their own lives, but also hers. Towards the end she comes to realize that there is no a correct answer awaiting at the end of either roadthe one of feelings or the one of reasonbut rather the answer can be find in the synthesising effect of art in reflecting reality and the feelings of the artist in her creation, and finally she has her Vision. To conclude, Virginia Woolfs To the Lighthouse can be seen through the eyes of the main characters as a constant quest to find the answer to the primordial question that afflicted philosophers throughout history. The use of the technique of stream of consciousness allows the author to provide the readers with the pure thinking processes of the characters, therefore underlying the importance of the subjective search for meaning of life.