Faculty of philology department of english philology viktorija mi

brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision.  (306) 
In the extract above, the reader’s attention is focused on the final stage of Lily’s painting, or 
more precisely, on the very product of her long lasting effort. In the process of painting, as it was 
mentioned in the previous subchapters, Lily referred to the reality in such a way that people looking 
at her painting could identify it successfully. However, this process of identification involves more 
that the simple mimicry of the world in the way it is, it is a great deal wider and requires much more 
reflection and meditation upon the question of life. I believe that Lily’s painting, as well as the 
eventual trip to the lighthouse; disclose the very value of life. It seems that something important is 
finally completed. Indeed, although in the novel, the writer convincingly demonstrates the power of 
time to destroy everything; this does not lessen the importance of positive experience gained by 
means of successfully acted performances in numerous situations. Indeed, every action, however 
insignificant or vague it may be, carries some deep meaning and importance in its nature, which 
must be disclosed and purposefully employed. Let us study one more example from the novel 
(1996):
(38) So that is marriage, Lily thought, a man and a woman looking at a girl throwing a 
ball [...] And suddenly the meaning which, for no reason at all [...] descends on people, 
making them symbolic, making them representative, came upon them, and made them in 
the dusk standing, looking, the symbols of marriage, husband and wife. Then, after an 
instant, the symbolical outline which transcended the real figures sank down again, 
and they became [...] Mr and Mrs Ramsay watching the children throwing catches. 

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81 
(84) 
I believe sincerely that this extract revealing Lily’s thoughts draws together the three thematic 
centres of this novel, namely: the Ramsay’s family life, the mystical symbolical outline, which 
transcends the real figures of the characters for a moment, and Lily’s attempt to master both symbol 
and reality. On the one hand, she simply sees the family spending time together: children playing, 
their parents watching them and talking. On the other hand, in this picture of family, Lily treats Mr. 
and Mrs. Ramsay as symbolic figures of husband and wife, father and mother and questions herself 
if these figures reflect the picture of family Lily has in her mind. I would claim that in her painting, 
Lily wants to portray this symbol of family, thus, not so much attention is paid to the real people 
that the family consists of. Originally, she shares similar concerns with Mr. Ramsay, wondering if 
her paintings will amount to anything and whether anyone will ever see them. By the final section 
of the novel, however, her thoughts are located more in the past and in her memories of Mrs. 
Ramsay. Partially the effect of these memories enables her to move forward and brings her vision 
into focus. 
How do critics interpret these moments of experience? The theorist Alex Zwerdling thinks 
that the extract above provides evidence that the characters in the novel are sometimes given 
symbolic identities. In his words (1987:182), “such passages underline the novel’s thematic 
concerns by shifting the reader’s attention away from the particular details of character and action 
to the general issues that concerned Woolf in writing “To the Lighthouse”. By comparison, 
according to Lee (1977:85), the consummation of the trip to the lighthouse and Lily’s completion of 
her painting, with a single line down the centre representing Mrs. Ramsay, signify the triumph of 
order over disorder and life over death. Stevenson, by comparison, foregrounds the role of narrator 
in this novel. He says (1998:56) that the omniscient narrator remained the standard explicative 
figure in fiction through the end of the nineteenth century, providing an informed and objective 
description of the characters and the plot. In the twentieth century, modernist writers basically 
aimed at reflecting a more truthful account of the subjective nature of experience. Thus, in 
Stevenson’s view, Woolf’s To the Lighthouse is the convincing example of this innovation, creating 
a reality that is completely constructed by the collection of the multiple subjective interiorities of its 
characters and presented by means of stream of consciousness technique. As stated by Lee (1977) , 
who agrees with Stevenson, Woolf creates a fictional world in which no objective, omniscient 
narrator is present. The majority of events are narrated from different perspectives in order to reflect 
the peculiarities of the inner processes of her characters, while there is an insufficiency of 
expositional information, expressing Woolf’s foregrounding of the thoughts and reflections that 
comprise the world in To the Lighthouse. 

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82 
All the evidence provided in this subchapter lead us to the natural conclusion that time is the 
kernel component of experience and reality and, in many ways, the novel is about the passage of 
time. However, as the reader can see, Woolf does not represent time in a conventional easily 
understandable way. I totally agree with Lee (1977) who claims convincingly that in The Window 
and The Lighthouse, time is conveyed only through the consciousness of the various characters, and 
moments last for pages as the reader is invited into the subjective experiences of many different 
realities. Indeed, The Window takes place over the course of a single afternoon that is expanded by 
Woolf’s method, and The Lighthouse seems almost directly connected to the first section, despite 
the fact that ten years have actually intervened. However, in Time Passes, the period of ten years is 
described in a fragmentary way with much information unspecified, thus, the changes in the lives of 
the Ramsays and their home seem to flash by like scenes viewed from the window of a moving 
train. This unsteady temporal rhythm convincingly conveys the broader sense of instability and 
change that the characters strive to comprehend, and it captures the fleeting nature of a reality that 
exists only in the mind and as a collection of the various subjective experiences of reality.