Faculty of philology department of english philology viktorija mi

3.4. A General Overview of Virginia Woolf’s Fiction and the Concept of Time 
 
According to Lee (1977:23), with no doubt, one of the most prominent literary figures of the 
twentieth century, Woolf is widely admired for her technical innovations in the novel, most notably 
her development of stream-of-consciousness narrative. Woolf’s writing reveals her literary talent as 
well as her interest in the multidimensional nature of human existence. Indeed, her original and 
innovative literary works explore the structures of human life, from the nature of relationships to the 
experience of time. As Stevenson adds (1998), her writing also deals with the issues relevant to her 
living epoch and the literary Bloomsbury circle. Throughout her works, she celebrates and analyzes 
the major Bloomsbury values of aestheticism and independence. Moreover, as Allen suggests 
(1954), her stream of consciousness style was influenced by, and responded to, the ideas of the 
thinker Henri Bergson and the novelist James Joyce, whose impact on Woolf’s novels I have 
foregrounded in the previous chapters. 
Baldic (1996) raises the opinion that in her literary works Woolf always questions whether all 
this surface detail in fiction makes literature valuable. She expresses hesitation related to the notion 
art and aims to focus of the deep layer analysis of literature. Similarly to Baldic, in Froula’s words 
(2007:13), influenced by the ideas of Bloomsbury Group, Woolf believed that “art must submit its 
judgements to moral law”. In her opinion, a writer’s mission, or task, is to analyze the depths of the 
present inner and outer reality instead of just inventing some unreal debatable details. Indeed, the 
new technique of stream of consciousness was applied in her narrative in order to express new 
revolutionary concepts. The consciousness of the characters in Woolf’s fiction was not simply 
described as in the works of Realism, but elaborately filtered through showing the way the 
characters are thinking and interpreting events. The feelings of the characters and the inner 
perceptions of life acquired a totally new meaning and in order to achieve this, the omniscient 
narrator was introduced throughout her novels. For instance, in the sentence “Had there been an axe 
handy …seized it” from To the Lighthouse(1996:7) the writer employs straightforward omniscient 
narrator in order to describe James’ anger at his father who does not want James to go to the 
Lighthouse. Although James does not utter these words aloud, the reader perceives them through 
the voice of narrator who knows everything that characters feel or think. Why is such way of 

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representing characters’ thoughts effective? Well, it is obvious that Woolf’s characters arerarel 
described directly; instead, they are depicted via their thoughts. Lee believes (1977:86) that the aim 
of all these strange techniques of description was to express continuity and mutability of the 
individual identity at the same time.
Indeed, in their literary works both Joyce and Woolf analysed the depth of human mind with 
the help of the interior monologue and the stream of consciousness, which enabled the writers to 
explore memories, desires, dreams of their characters, who could be observed in their external and 
interior appearance. However, Froula (2007:13) thinks that this way of handling the protagonists of 
Woolf’s works was even deeper than that of Joyce. Whereas Joyce examined the depths of the ego, 
or human essence, Woolf never let her characters’ thoughts flow freely. Instead, she maintained 
logical and grammatical organization of every single sentence so that every reader could understand 
the essence of the characters’ words or thoughts. In other words, her narrative technique was based 
on the synthesis of streams of thought into a third-person, past tense narrative. She gave the 
impression of simultaneous connections between the inner and the outer world, the past and the 
present, speech and silence. As Mrs Ramsay says in To the Lighthouse (1927:55), the whole human 
life consists of “little separate incidents which one lived one by one” and which she then describes 
as