Faculty of philology department of english philology viktorija mi

2.4.Alterations of Time Due to the Deictic Centre 
 
The process of communication, which involves the speaker and the addressee, occurs in a 
specific spatial-temporal situation. The participants of social interaction wish to convey and to 
obtain the information and both the speaker and the addressee have the similar status; they both are 
partners in this information exchange. Any situation, real or fictional, necessarily involves the 
identification of entities, processes, and circumstances, which may be revealed by means of deixis. 
According to Longman Dictionary of English Language and Culture (1998), deixis is a term used to 
denote a word or a phrase that directly refers to entities. Deictic centre, by comparison, includes 
certain spatial, temporal, and psychological coordinates establishing a deictic perspective in the 
narrated world. In other words, it is possible to say that deixis obtains its meaning from the situation 
because every language utterance is made in a specific place, at a specific time, and by a specific 

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person and centres around one deictic centre, or the reference point, which leads the situation of 
interaction. In other words, deixis usually functions when a certain subject exists who perceives 
time or place where it is articulated and, then, it evokes a speaker’s figure. 
I think that in Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse, the notion of time has various aspects that 
change on the basis of the personal, temporal, spatial, and social deictic centres. Thus, in this 
subchapter I aim to carry a deeper analysis of these variations. As mentioned in the previous 
chapters, Woolf was highly interested in both the conscious and the subconscious part of the human 
mind. The study of consciousness in her fiction, including To the Lighthouse, is represented in two 
major ways: either characters express it verbally, or they employ non – verbal means of interaction. 
Naturally, a consciousness is supposed to belong to a person. However, Verdonk and Weber believe 
(1995:83) that Woolf, like some other modernist authors, usually purposefully hides the speaker or 
thinker form her readers’ eyes and thus, the ideas expressed are identified and understood but their 
sources, or speakers, are not so easily recognized. As Poole infers (1995:3), Woolf aspired to “to 
master people and states of mind and states of embodiment”, in order to concentrate her readers’ 
attention to the characters’ inside world, not to the voice narrating these experiences. Indeed, in her 
fiction the speaker’s figure usually remains vague and in a way interpretive, as called by Stevenson 
(1998:56). In such cases the passage is narrated by the third person narrator and there are no 
characters at the scene, as the anonymous observer is present behind the scene. I believe that such 
way of telling a story encourages readers to make their own judgements and predictions, which 
means that both the writer and the reader act as creative participants in the production of a piece of 
literature.
How does Woolf apply the “unseen” narrator and what role does this technique play in her 
fiction? Let us consider the following example from To the Lighthouse (1996), where Mrs. 
Ramsay’s thoughts are revealed: 
(12) “The stocking was too short by half and inch at least, making allowance for the 
fact that Sorley’s little boy would be less well grown than James. ’It’s too short,’ she 
said, 'ever so much too short.'
Never did anybody look so sad. Bitter and black, half-way down, in the darkness, in 
the shaft which ran from the sunlight to the depths, perhaps a tear formed; a tear fell; 
the waters swayed this way and that, received it, and were at rest. Never did anybody 
look so sad. 
But was it nothing but looks? People said what was there behind it - her beauty, her