Faculty of philology department of english philology viktorija mi

flesh turned to atoms which drove before the wind. (126) 
As can be seen form the extract, time here is shown as a cruel destructive force damaging people’s 
lives, the force that nobody can overcome or to make profit from. Indeed, time is depicted by means 
of natural images of the changing seasons and universal natural phenomena (this can be seen from 
the phrases in bold). It is possible to say that here Woolf’s sensitiveness to changing human 
experience manifests itself in new ways of looking at man’s position and function in the universe. 
(John Anthony Bowden Cuddon, 1991:551) 
Indeed, we can presuppose on the basis of the way of temporal representation in this extract 
that much of the text of Time Passes is dominated by abstract pieces and fragments of human 
presence. The characters’ lives are portrayed in the subtle context of time passing and only the 
house and lighthouse remain unchanged, as symbols of reliability and memory. In my opinion, in 
this part of To the Lighthouse, Woolf portrays the temporality that is beyond the human 
psychology; as the slow compressed nature of the first section can be treated as a hint to the 
growing speed with which years pass and events occur in the second section, as the following 
extract from the novel convincingly illustrates (1996): 
(36) “night after night, and sometimes in plain mid-day when the roses were bright 
and light turned on the wall its shape clearly there seemed to drop into this silence”. 
(178) 
In the third part of the novel The Lighthouse time regains its slow meditative passage, and the 
events are seen from different characters’ points of view, similarly to the narrative perspective 
provided in The Window. It is foregrounded that whereas Mrs. Ramsay’s search for permanence lies 
in the emotional realm of experience, her husband bases his life on the power of reason and 
intellect. As far as I am concerned, this character longs to transcend his lifetime with an important 
philosophical contribution, yet feels practically certain that this goal is unachievable. One more 
character Lily suffers from a similar fear that people will not appreciate the value of her paintings 

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and will be throw them into the attic, never to be fully understood and never to make a lasting 
impression. It seems to me that Lily treats her canvasses as a certain final solution of all the spiritual 
problems, while painting she wants to show the beauty and the meaning that is still present in life so 
that it would stay forever unrestrained by the destructive passage of time. 
By the culmination of the novel, however, Lily manages to overcome her fear and uncertainty 
and fulfils her need for permanence and meaning. Thus, she is finally able to accomplish her artistic 
vision. In my opinion, this final scene suggests that Lily can only achieve a sense of implementation 
because she is able to surrender her need for a permanently significant existence. She finally 
understands the multidimensional nature of human existence, and her painting serves as a mirror in 
which all these fractures of life find their place and compose the whole mosaic of life. To prove 
these statements, let us now consider the following example from To the Lighthouse (1996) that 
enables the reader to learn how Lily feels after having finished her picture: 
(37) With a sudden intensity, as if she saw it clear for a second, she drew a line 
there, in the centre. It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her