Faculty of philology department of english philology viktorija mi

up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what follows after. Thus, the 
most ordinary movement in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand 
towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments… our commonest deeds are set 
about with a fluttering and flickering of wings, a rising and falling of lights”. 
Some theorists and literary critics tend to characterize modernist discourse as a literary 
revolution because of its literary and linguistic innovations. North (1998:98) clearly supports Lee 
and Stevenson’s considerations about the role of FID in Woolf’s fiction as well as in modernist 
narrative in general and ponders the conclusion that Woolf can be a master of the aforementioned 
literary form, in which the identity of the narrator is not entirely clear. According to North (ibid.), 
her novels abound with dialogue that is not indicated by quotation marks, as well as phrases and 
passages that could easily be spoken or merely thought. This form of narration is told in the third 
person, but it conveys a sense of the character’s internal thoughts from the character’s own 
experience, thereby expressing these thoughts somewhere between a first-person and third-person 
mode of narrative, as the following extract from To the Lighthouse (1927) demonstrates: 
(10) […] her eyes had been going in and out among the curves and shadows of the 
fruit… putting a yellow against a purple, a curved shape against a round shape… 
until, oh, what a pity that they should do it – a hand reached out, took a pear, and 
spoilt the whole thing. (125) 
North‘s insights lead us to the premise that Woolf‘s use of stream of consciousness and FID 
enhance the themes of the novel To the Lighthouse. Indeed, in the novel, the author forcefully 
conveys the subjective experience of reality, and the intensive use of stream of consciousness 
indicates that a person‘s experience cannot be truly understood and interpreted through the 
objective scope of a neutral objective narrator. Instead, Woolf suggests that reality is more like the 

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mirror of the various perspectives and experiences of individuals. One person in one particular 
situation for instance, cannot accurately describe the protagonist of the novel, Mrs. Ramsay. The 
reader can perceive the picture of her character only when a number of other characters express 
their contradictory impressions of her. In North’s opinion, this protagonist of the novel is a 
convincing representation of every modern human, of his complex nature and multidimensional 
mind. Throughout the novel, she is constantly searching for her own self, her lost identity, and at 
the same time, despite her weaknesses, she manages to serve as a solid moral support to other 
characters that need her. (North 1998:102) 
Similarly to North, Verdonk and Weber (1995:56) say that the narrative chain that Woolf 
creates in the novel, linking the consciousness of various characters in an unbroken flow, 
emphasizes the connections between people that Mrs. Ramsay always tries to establish and 
maintain. In Verdonk and Weber’s opinion, she serves as a symbolic link in the alienated modernist 
surroundings, and though each character seems to be a separate individual, their influence and 
dependence on one other is undeniable. Thus, their interrelated thoughts and activities form the 
narrative eiderdown, and they all shape one another’s experiences and emerge from one another’s 
perspectives. For instance, when one of the characters of To the Lighthouse Lily Briscoe sees the 
drawing-room steps in the third part of the novel, she thinks that they look empty and gloomy. She 
asks, “How could one express in words these emotions of the body? Express that emptiness there?” 
(1996:265). The theorist Geoffrey Leech (1974:9) claims that in order to understand Lily’s 
questions the reader should recall that this emptiness can be interpreted as both physical and 
metaphysical space. In the linguist’s words, “that is mistaken to try to define meaning by reducing it 
to the terms of sciences other than the science of language: e.g. to the terms of psychology or 
chemistry” (Leech, ibid.) The room is empty as there are no people in it, but this emptiness is also 
present in Lily’s mind, in her thoughts, and the words uttered by her in a way reflect her inner state. 
Thus, it is logical to claim that the emptiness that Lily sees can be understood only through the 
perspective of the character’s emotions and feelings, not logical judgments.
Benjamin Nelson (1965 :157) complements Leech and believes that the notion of emptiness 
described by Lily can be treated as a psychological dimension of physical and emotional existence 
rather than as an ineluctable metaphysical condition, as here Woolf constitutes innovative narrative 
based on the analysis the physical world of the characters. What is more, as Nelson points out 
(ibid.), her narrative includes the double meaning of every single element and moment of life. 
Woolf’s narrative, which exists between her characters’ fictional world, discovers and reveals all its 
peculiarities and mysteries. In short, it seems certainly that in her novels, including To the 
Lighthouse, Woolf raises eternal questions by the humankind of death and presence, speech and 

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silence, time and space by means of the linguistic technique of FID that enables readers to observe 
the nature of human inside.
According to Morris (2004:7), in this world there are a lot of unanswered questions and 
unknown mysteries, as well as that the fragmented self in a disordered and rapidly changing world 
is not going to have its hopes for closure, for an end to alienation, satisfied. However, every human 
being experiences moments of insight, flashes of meaning, in which something important is caught 
in the imagination, as if in the glare of the lighthouse beam. In addition, if that moment inevitably 
passes by almost as soon as it has been realized, something has been discovered which one can at 
least remember. In this sense, it is possible to claim convincingly that we can subjectively 
understand the essence of life, even if what we consider to be undeniable evidence will never 
accurately account for the real meaning of the experience.