Faculty of philology department of english philology viktorija mi

he was a baby; now his father used to fish him with a boat hook; that was how he had 
learnt to swim. One of his uncles kept the light on some rock or other of the Scottish 
coast, he said. He had been there with him in a storm. This was said loudly in a 
pause. They had to listen to him when he said that he had been with his uncle in a 
lighthouse in a storm. Ah, thought Lily Briscoe, as the conversation took this 
auspicious turn, and she felt Mrs Ramsay’s gratitude. 
(106) 
It is obvious that in the passage, the complexity of one of the character Lily Briscoe’s mind is 
presented. However, it is possible to see under a more elaborate analysis that the deictic elements of 
this passage are interestingly interrelated and complement one another. The first sentence of the 
extract serves to move the reference time of the narrative forward, while the other five sentences 
seem to complement the designated events with the help of discourse. The temporal deixis 
obviously cover a wide scope from the moment of character’s speaking up to the past events, when 
the speaker was a baby. I believe that this temporal incoherence is used purposefully, in order to 
create a certain stylistic and rhetorical effect. Obviously, as the example convincingly illustrates, the 
stream of consciousness technique involves recording character’s thoughts and feelings exactly as 
they occurred in her mind, without any comment or explanation. Modernist discourse demonstrates 
a particular interest into the subconscious mind that is constantly changing and portrayed it by 
means of fragmentation and zigzagging. Consequently, as Stevenson says (1998:160), all of the 
peculiarities that are found in Modernism are a result of the complex identity of the person that is 
often damaged by the disintegration of social cohesion. 
In my opinion, there is enough evidence to claim that in To the Lighthouse, there are the 
connections between space, time, objectivity, and consciousness that closely resemble to those 
expressed by the scientist Albert Einstein. Here I adhere to the insights of Morris N. et al 

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(272:2004), who claim in their encyclopaedia that Woolf’s representation of space and time is 
closely linked with the scientist’s understanding of relative universe, time and space. Albert 
Einstein aimed to prove scientifically that the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously. 
According to Morris et al. (ibid.), Einstein “believed there is no true division between past and 
future, there is rather a single existence”. The scientist rejected other physicists’ hypothesis that 
there is clear the separation between past, present, and future and called such understanding of 
reality an illusion. Einstein made radical innovative conclusions declaring the existence of a 
timeless perspective of the universe, which clearly denied Newton’s theory of absolute time. 
Similarly, Woolf in her fiction and especially in To the Lighthouse portrays time via her characters’ 
consciousness, thus, one character is able to cover several days or months in his or her mind while 
another simultaneously experiences only a few hours or minutes. Events in Woolf’s novel are 
revealed exactly in the way they occur in human mind because as Richard Ruland and Malcolm 
Bradbury notice in their study (1991:1), modernist fiction can be called “art of modern 
footlessness” as it allows the writer to see the world as boundless, existing free in the context of 
everlasting time and space. 
As can be seen from all the evidence above, the variability and complexity of the deictic 
elements in To the Lighthouse is a powerful means of showing that every fictional world is 
inhabited by characters who can evoke memories, create fantasies, express their beliefs and wishes, 
state their intentions, and so create their own worlds in the text world. However, I am convinced 
that it is difficult to understand the essence of such divisions if these fictional worlds are not 
accessible to the reader. Thus, to make herself understandable, Woolf employs a universal language 
of symbols and metaphoric images of time and space that help the reader see and understand what is 
not written or directly said in the novel. As George Lakoff (1987:303) claims in his study, “in 
domains where there is no clearly discernible preconceptual structure to our experience, we import 
such structure via metaphor. Metaphor provides us with a means of comprehending domains of 
experience that do not have a preconceptual structure of their own”. Consequently, in the following 
chapter of my research I am going to carry the detailed analysis of the interface of time and space in 
the literary works of Woolf and other modernist writers and add to the existing knowledge of 
Woolf’s time and space treatment.

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