"To The Lighthouse"

Book Review # 108990

English > Analysis
Literature > English

"To The Lighthouse"

An analysis of Virginia Woolf's narrative in her novel "To The Lighthouse".

2,545 words () | 0 sources | 2006 United States

Paper Summary:

This paper discusses how Virginia Woolf undercuts any omniscient perspective by leaving her characters to write their own narratives in her novel "To The Lighthouse". It examines how Woolf's narrator secedes to the background as the characters' own interior voices take over the pages and how admission from the reader into the oblique inner monologue allows Woolf to move slickly from one character to another. It looks at how, with this method, Woolf successfully negotiates between public space of the Ramsay's home and the private space of a particular character's consciousness and how the narrative is a string of public events and private thoughts.

From the Paper:

"For Mrs. Ramsay, the lighthouse represents her isolation from her husband, yet her connection with him in her need to nurture. The lighthouse is not just a building, it is "something immune which shines out." In his words, Mr. Ramsay thinks of the lighthouse as a stark tower on a bare rock, which symbolizes his inability to give meaning to temporal things through emotions and language. The lighthouse is changes meaning in James' perspective. To him, the lighthouse is representative of Mrs. Ramsay and is also representative of the bleak rationalism of Mr. Ramsay. With these two seemingly different conceptions of what the lighthouse represents, James has embodied the true nature of language: nothing is simply one thing. Both of his dueling interpretations are right. "