Faculty of philology department of english philology viktorija mi

children. […]Andrew would be a better man than he had been. Prue would be a 
beauty, her mother said. (64) 
As can be seen from the given extract, despite the fact that the narrative of the first section covers 
only a day, within this, Woolf depicts a wide variety of times, including the past, the present, and 
the future. The first two sentences of this longish example depict some details from Mr. Ramsay’s 
past memories: he recalls the days when he used to spend much time alone and enjoyed this 
loneliness and calmness. Then suddenly, the character brings his thoughts into the present and 
understands that now, being a father of eight children, he no longer has the right to privacy and 
freedom of behaviour. Finally, as the words in bold in the last two sentences show, Mr. Ramsay 
projects his thoughts into the future and draws a beautiful picture of his children already grown up, 
beautiful and wise. Indeed, I would like to claim that to my mind, this extract does not simply 
depict the changing nature of human mind, but it also enables the reader to learn more about the 
character whose thoughts are expressed. It is obvious that for Mr. Ramsay, the past is the period of 
positivism and pleasant experience, thus, he mentally returns to those days in order to escape from 
the discouraging and problematic present reality. On the other hand, he expresses some hopeful 
dreams about the future by seeing his children as better people than he is, and perhaps he even 
expects his son to have the ambitions that Mr. Ramsay was not brave or determined enough to fight 
for.
What else can we learn from the extract? In Ginger’s words (1973:128), “Woolf’s method is 
to reproduce the moments at which experience is caught and reflected in the mind”. Thus, there is 
enough evidence to claim that as a typical modernist man, Mr. Ramsay perceives the flowing time 
from dual angle. On the one hand, he tends to neglect the past because, as reason implies, it cannot 
have meaningful influence on his present life situations. On the other hand, the character attempts to 
cover his confusion and disappointment caused by the present situation by concentrating on the past 
memories. Thus, Ginger comes to the logical conclusion (ibid.) that Mr. Ramsay attempts to make 
sense of his confused feelings to which the present situation gives rise by setting his life 
interchangeably in the past and in the future situations that both are in a way unreal and thus, cannot 
serve as solution of effective help. 
It seems to me that the second section of the novel provides the greatest amount of the 
material for analysis of time in the book and endows with a very interesting interpretation of spatial 
and temporal factors that influence characters’ life. Here Woolf foregrounds the notion of temporal 

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changeability and the rapid passing of time through impressionistic language combined with 
accurate descriptions concerning the fates of the characters we have been introduced to in the first 
part of the novel. The reader learns that one of the Ramsay’s children, Prue, gets married but dies 
after childbirth, while another child, Andrew, is killed during the war. Mrs. Ramsey’s death only 
adds to the painful occurrences concentrated in the second part of the novel. What role does time 
play in the context of these events and experiences? Let us consider the following extract from To 
the Lighthouse (1990): 
(35) As summer neared, as the evenings lengthened, there came to the wakeful, the 
hopeful, walking the beach, stirring the pool, imaginations of the strangest kind - of