Faculty of philology department of english philology viktorija mi

splendour? Had he blown his brains out they asked, had he died the week before they 
were married - some other, earlier lover, of whom rumours reached one? (33) 

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In the present quotation, the reader learns about Mrs. Ramsay’s reflections. However, there 
are thoughts in bold that seem to be uttered by an unseen omniscient observer who knows how the 
character feels. Perhaps this is other people’s attitude towards Mrs. Ramsay that she is 
reconsidering now? Alternatively, could we say that this is the way in which she characterizes 
herself? I suppose that neither of the two versions serves as the right interpretation of the words in 
bold. Thus, it is possible to say that although this speaking voice exists in the room near Mrs. 
Ramsay, it is not identified and clearly recognized. To my mind, the use of such unusual narrator 
may serve to emphasize that someone, though invisible, should exist inside the fictional world of 
the novel. Indeed, I can adhere to the theorist Michael Whithworth (2005:5) who calls such Mrs. 
Ramsay’s considerations “philanthropical excursions” and believes that this is her own inner voice, 
or consciousness expressing itself. In his words, the reader learns Mrs. Ramsay’s thoughts that even 
she herself is not always conscious about, as Woolf opens her characters’ minds more than a person 
is able to reveal by means of the human forces. 
Why does the writer chose this strange, even mystical voice telling us about the characters’ 
lives? As stated by Lawrence Rainey, Woolf provides “an extraordinary record of an especially 
observant contemporary one acutely responsive to almost every aspect of the world around her”. 
(2005:827) According to the critic, the first and third chapters of the novel lack an omniscient 
narrator and the plot unfolds through shifting perspectives of each character’s stream of 
consciousness. This lack of an omniscient narrator means that, throughout the novel, no clear 
personal deictic centre exists for the reader and that only through character development readers can 
formulate their own opinions and views as it is not always clear whose opinion or thoughts they 
perceive. I would like to claim that the first chapter the novel is concerned with illustrating the 
relationship between the characters’ experience and the actual surroundings. By comparison, the 
second part, which has no characters to relate to, presents events differently: instead, Woolf wrote 
the section from the perspective of a displaced narrator, unrelated to any people, intending that 
events be seen related to time. Thus, from this perspective it is possible to say that in the book, the 
specific speaker is not so easily identified, thus, the deictic centre is that of rather debatable nature. 
According to Verdonk and Weber (1995:83), in her literary works Woolf emphasized the 
significance of an altering deictic centre, or the semantic core of a novel. The novelist began writing 
in a new experimental style that usually embodied Freud’s approach to human mind in which there 
is always an invisible but active “self”. Freud insists that unconsciousness exists under the layer of 
consciousness in each human mind, and in alongside the individual unconsciousness, collective 
unconsciousness exists. According to Freud (1964: 89), collective unconsciousness can be defined 
as the whole of human experiences that have been acquired and passed from generation to 

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generation. Woolf was strongly interested in anonymous consciousness and unconsciousness which, 
in her opinion, served as reliable evidence explaining the peculiarities of individual characters’ 
minds. Thus, the author’s interest in the human minds seems to lie not only in an individual entity, 
but also in a collective unity of human mind, which has existed universally as the subconscious or 
unconscious since primitive ages. Indeed, in my opinion, this innovation focuses on character’s 
consciousness and subconsciousness that enable the writer to portray allusive and difficult world of 
the twentieth century in a more convincing manner. To ground this idea, I suggest reflecting on the 
following example from Woolf’s fiction (1996):
(13) Judging the turn in her mood correctly – that she was friendly to him now – he was
relieved of his egotism, and told her now how he had been thrown out of a boat when