To the Lighthouse

The purpose of this research is to examine To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. The plan of the research will be to set forth the outlines of action, character, and theme in the novel, and then to discuss ways in which character is related to the narrative structure, or pattern of ideas emerging in the work and means by which these ideas emerge. What this reading of the novel will suggest is that in To the Lighthouse, as indeed in much of Woolf's work, lasting emotional impact is derived from a bleak simplicity of narrative design, often in the form of fleeting impressions experienced by the characters. Such narrative devices are used to convey the intensity (or lack of intensity, as an attribute of character) of expression.

The action of To the Lighthouse cannot be discussed apart from its environment, and both action and environment are decisive elements of structure. In part, this confluence of elements is located in the atmosphere of bleakness that overlays character, emotion, and activity (such as there is) in To the Lighthouse. In a spare narrative framework, more suggested than explicated, Woolf finds precision and insight by way of her characters.

The novel as a design of action invites the reader to observe internal emotional content of the Ramsays' family life, even as it "frames" the completion of Lily's painting of the externals of the Ramsay environment. The unsettled nature of vulgar reality is juxtaposed against the ordered nature of art, which has bee

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h regard to Lily's character as a feature of narrative structure is that she has the sensibility of the artist, watching the family unit that she is attached to but not really of. So, too, does Woolf watch the entire cast of characters, dispensing narrative action as she watches, apart from all yet attached to all. In a memoir, Woolf touches on precisely this sensibility, which has its counterpart in Lily's view of her artistic self: I can reach a state where I seem to be watching things happen as if I were there. That is, I suppose, that my memory supplies what I had forgotten, so that it seems as if it were happening independently, though I am really making it happen. In certain favourable moods, memories--what one has forgotten--come to the top. Now if this is so, is it not possible--I often wonder--that things we have felt with great intensity have an existence independent of our minds; are in fact still in existence? And if so, will it not be possible, in time, that some device will be invented by which we can tap them . . . I am hardly aware of myself, but only of the sensation. I am only the container of the feeling of ecstasy, of the feeling of rapture. Perhaps this is characteristic of all childhood memories; per

Category: Literature - T