Faculty of philology department of english philology viktorija mi

had not said a word, he knew, of course he knew, that she loved him. He could not 
deny it. And smiling she looked out of the window and said (thinking to herself, 
Nothing on earth can equal this happiness)— 
“Yes, you were right. It’s going to be wet tomorrow. You won’t be able to go.” And 
she looked at him smiling. For she had triumphed again. She had not said it: yet he 
knew. (105) 
I believe that in his passage, the writer convincingly depicts the complicated human nature 
and shows how people and their fragmented emotions can come together. This detailed description 
of Mrs Ramsay’s thoughts indirectly characterizes the woman as led by emotions and intuition 

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rather than by reason and logics so important for her husband. It seems that Mr. Ramsay relies on 
what can be studied and proven verbally or in any other way. Thus, as we see in the extract, he 
wants to hear Mrs. Ramsay declare her love for him. Mrs. Ramsay, however, relies on the language 
of feelings and mimics; she does not want to verbalize her inner thoughts. Indeed, she is incapable 
of expressing her love for her husband through words, but she does in fact love him. However, her 
love does not need to be expressed in words in order to be understood by her husband. 
According to Poole (1995), the way in which the novel is structured is also very important for 
the understanding of its major theme of time. The first part covers the end of a day, from the 
afternoon to the night. In my opinion, it is possible to treat the first part of the book as the 
foundation for the characters and the core ideas and issues within the novel. It is dominated by Mrs. 
Ramsay’s prescience, while in the last third section of the novel Mrs. Ramsey does not appear 
because, as the reader learns, she is dead. In the first part, little action is involved, and thus, little 
real time passes, however, much unmeasured and time is left for Mrs. Ramsay’s thoughts, memories 
and reflections. Thus, Poole (1995:7) believes that Woolf “had the power of seeing where human 
problems were likely to arise and delicately averted them if she could” and implies that perhaps by 
portraying this clash between physical and psychological temporality in this section the writer in a 
way wanted to presuppose the inadequacy between the protagonist’s point of view and values and 
the outer world which is hostile and mysterious. By comparison, the second part, which covers a 
period of ten years, is most influential in exploring the effects of time. In the second part of the 
novel, we also learn that due to the World War, the Ramsay’s family no longer stays at their 
summerhouse, which remains deserted and forgotten, full of dark empty shapes and strange sounds. 
To my mind, the abstract relationship between shapes and space is very important in the novel 
because the interior of the house reflects both the deserted living place and deserted human souls 
damaged by the cruelties of the war. To prove this statement, let us consider the following example 
from the novel which could serve as evidence proving the above-mentioned statements (1996): 
(15) What people had shed and left – a pair of shoes, a shooting cap, some faded 
skirts an coats in wardrobes – those alone kept the human shape in the emptiness 
indicated how once they were filled with animation [. . .] 
So loveliness reigned and stillness, and together made the shape of loveliness itself, a 
form from which life had parted. (147) 
As the passage clearly demonstrates, the personified image of the house echoes the influence 
that time has on the existence of every living or non-living being. Time here is shown as a 
destructive force that nobody is able to control or to overcome. Certainly, this foregrounding of 
time as active participant in the narrative events is necessary for modernist Woolf’s fiction. Indeed, 

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in To the Lighthouse, the writer attempts to portray internal time, as it exists in the mind, free from 
the arbitrary divisions of past, present, and future; as in the mind, these dimensions flow together. 
At the same time, she employs the notion of external time in order to disclose the contrast between 
the current of events in the characters’ mind and in the reality of the novel. Here I can adhere to 
Faulkner who claims that Woolf’s time philosophy is closely connected to her stream of 
consciousness technique. The critic draws an interesting parallel between the ways Woolf and Joyce 
choose to depict temporal elements in their fiction. In Faulkner’s view, Woolf does not actually use 
the stream of consciousness method in the same way as Joyce, who attempts to record the complete 
thoughts of his characters, however disorganized, temporally fragmented, and confusing they might 
seem to the reader. As the theorist alleges in his study (1977 :32), “consciousness, as James and 
Joyce had shown before her, is not the passive reception of impulses from the outer world but is 
creative; perception itself, and not just its representation in novels, is intentional, implying the 
activity of making meaning, structuring reality“. He continues his insights by saying that the 
thoughts of Woolf’s characters are obviously revised; only a small portion of the character’s 
thoughts appears. The voice of the author frequently interrupts the chain of characters’ thoughts as 
additional remarks such as “she thought“ or “ he understood“ are constantly repeated. The 
employment of these elements can be illustrated by the following short examples from To the 
Lighthouse (2006): 
(16) So they sat silent. Then she became aware that she wanted him to say something.
Anything, anything, she thought, going on with her knitting. Anything will do.
(99) 
(17) There it was before her – life. Life: she thought, but she didn’t finish her thought. 
She took a look at life, for she had a clear sense of it here, something real, something 
private, which she shared neither with her children nor with her husband.
(50) 
As can be seen from the extracts, with the help of these intrusions, Virginia Woolf manages to put 
more direction and unity into her fiction than other modernist writers do, and Lee (977) believes 
that the stream of consciousness technique undoubtedly can be called representative of our modern 
age because it is a revolt against the power of passing time. According to the theorist, it is possible 
to distinguish the linguistic and literary perspective of time in Woolf’s fiction. How can these kinds 
of time be defined and what functions do they perform in the novel “To the Lighthouse”? In the 
following subchapter, I am going to focus on the different theorists and analysts attitudes toward the 
above- mentioned time division in language, literature, and in particular, in the given Woolf’s 
novel. 

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