Exploration of To the Lighthouse :: essays papers

Exploration of To the Lighthouse In Virginia Woolfs fiction, the break pour down or good luck open, of traditional literary formulas in the light of the twentieth century querying of perception, frankness and linguistic meaning, is recorded as a reconceiving of the novel-form. Throughout the course of her novels she lays down a challenge to official ways of measuring proportion, light, time and human race character. Abolishing chapter and verse, Woolf creates a rhythmic, wave-like form of undulating passages as in music, where the structure of parts indoors an individual movement is a continuous flow rather than a series of stops and starts. She identifies language itself as a volatile and uncertain system of mirroring suggestions reality as potentially unknowable, and the novel form itself as inclined to substantial change to accommodate these perspectives. Virginia Woolf renounces the tarradiddle persona as a sort of privileged extra character testifying to indisputab le intellectual and physical events and evaluating their significance. She shifts significance to the act of mediation itself as a firsthand subject to be investigated *. To the Lighthouse *develops a system of passing the billy goat of interior monologue from one character to another by its eavesdropping of the self-sealed soul of a group enwrapped in meditation through the enlarge of two life-encapsculating days. In *To the Lighthouse* the proportion of direct speech to substantiating speech is minuscule, and, indeed rudimentary. If we reduce the first section of the novel to its dialogue, the next structure emergesYes, of course, if its fine to-morrow, verbalize Mrs Ramsay. But youll have to be up with the lark...But, state his father . . . it wont be fine.*But it may be fine - I digest it will be fine, said Mrs Ramsay . . .Its due west, said the atheist Tansley . . .Nonsense, said Mrs Ramsay . . . *Therell be no landing at the Lighthouse to-morrow, said Charles Tan sley . . . Would it eagre you to come with me, Mrs Tansley?Let us all go she cried . . . Lets go, he said.Good-bye, Elsie, she said. (pp.3-16) Inconsequent voices defence about the weather typical English conversation implying an apathetic form of communion, signifying little - so we might assess this dialogue if it were presented to us as I have transcribed it, dissecting it from its root-network in the complex matrix of the narrative voice which recounts the soliloquies of the persons from whom these extracts of conversation are gathered.