Faculty of philology department of english philology viktorija mi

her own eyes meeting her own eyes, searching as she alone could search into her 
mind and her heart, purifying out the existence that lie, any lie. She praised herself in 
praising the light, without vanity, for she was stern, she was searching, she was 
beautiful like that light. (53) 
In my opinion, in this passage, the thorough employment of personal pronouns instead of 
using names helps to transform narrative forms in each sentence or even in one long sentence 
without giving readers any discomfort about the changed manner of character representation. I 
support Lee’s claim that it is clear for the reader which character is described and, what is more, 
there is no redundant repetition or ambiguous naming. Indeed, all the given evidence can lead us to 
the hypothetical premise that in Woolf’s fiction, the personal pronouns he, she, and one play a 
significant role in expressing characters’ minds, although this does not mean that the 
aforementioned pronouns are always employed in consciousness describing scenes. (Lee ibid.) 
Thus, as can be seen from the above statements, an author can describe the verbally 
unexpressed thoughts and feelings of a character without the devices of objective narration or 
dialogue. In To the Lighthouse, Woolf makes constant use of this technique, and it is established as 
the predominant style from the beginning. In this novel, the action mainly occurs not in the outside 
world but in the thoughts and feelings of the characters as exhibited by the ongoing narrative. 
Although there is a narrative voice apart from any of the characters, Peter Widdowson (1999: 147) 
emphasizes the fact that a large part of the narrative consists of the exposition of each characters’ 
consciousness. The theorist explains this interesting thought by saying that some sections use entire 
pages without letting an objective voice interrupt the flow of thoughts of a single character. 
With no doubt, as it has already been mentioned in previous chapters, the employment of the 
stream of consciousness technique in modernist fiction has a reliable psychological background. 
Onega and Landa believe (1996) that as a literary device, stream of consciousness was highly 
influenced by Sigmund Freud who was interested in the nature and function of the human 
unconscious. In the critics’ words (1996:25), modern fiction “is often combined with early 
psychoanalytical approaches. Sigmund Freud himself devoted some attention to the 
psychoanalytical interpretation of narrative literature as well as to the narrative dimension of 
psychoanalysis. Early analyses based on Freud’s work lay more emphasis on the former, that is, on 
mechanisms of identification in reading, the writer's fantasies of sexuality and power, or the 
'pathological' origin of plot structures and patterns of images or motifs.” Indeed, the linguists 
claim that Freud provided an innovative interpretation of the theory that there is a part of the mind 
to which we do not have complete access, with the implication that we cannot know all of our own 

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thoughts, fears, motivations, and desires. Thus, modernist writers were intrigued by this concept, 
and they sought in various ways to depict and illuminate the human unconscious. Stevenson (1998) 
supports Onega and Landa’s statements and remarks that although stream of consciousness is the 
illumination of thoughts and feelings that characters consciously experience, Woolf carries a great 
deal deeper analysis of the human mind than a conventional narrative about the past, providing an 
intimate view of a character’s interior world. In Bennett’s opinion (1964: 103), it is possible to say 
that with the help of the stream of consciousness, the writer not only expresses the flow of each 
character’s thoughts, but she also combines them into a narrative that flows fluently from the 
picture of one character’s mind to another’s without any boundaries. Indeed, Woolf foregrounds the 
importance of memories and flashbacks into the past and remarks in her novel Orlando (1928:55) 
that “memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that. Memory runs her needle in and out,