To The Lighthouse : Stream of Consciousness Novel

The phrase “Stream of Consciousness” was coined by William James to describe the flow of thoughts of the waking mind. It is a person's thoughts and conscious reactions to events, perceived as a continuous flow. In literature it is a literary style in which a character's thoughts, feelings, and reactions are depicted in a continuous flow uninterrupted by objective description or conventional dialogue. The related phrase “interior monologue” is used to describe the inner movement of consciousness in a character’s mind. The use of devices of the stream of consciousness and the interior monologue marks a revolution in the form of the novel because through these devices the author can represent the flux of a character’s thoughts, impressions, and emotions and reminiscences (recollections), often without any logical sequence.

According to Virginia Woolf, the conventional novel did not express life adequately. She was of the opinion that life was a shower of ever-failing atoms of experience, and not a narrative line. Life, she said, was a luminous halo (radiance), a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to end. She tried to experiment with the same technique in her novel, ’To the Lighthouse’. In which the characters reveal themselves very much in the same way.

Although she depicts character through the inner consciousness of the person whom we meet in this novel but she herself remains the controlling intelligence, speaking in the third person. While she very seldom slips in comments of her own, she remains the narrator, telling us what is going on in the various minds.

Virginia Woolf shows us a particular person in this novel not only through the consciousness of that person himself or herself, but also through the consciousness of the other persons. We are given the interior monologues of the various characters in this novel, and it is largely through the twin devices of stream of consciousness and the interior monologue that we come to know the various characters. Thus we see Mrs. Ramsay not only through her own consciousness but through the consciousness of Mr. Ramsey, the child James, Lily Briscoe, Mr. Tansley and Mr. Bankes. Similarly we come to know Mr. Ramsay not only through his own consciousness but also through the consciousness of Mrs. Ramsay, the young James, Lily Briscoe, and Mr. Bankes. In fact, every character in the novel is presented to us through his own consciousness and also through the consciousness of the other characters. At the same time, the characters are occasionally presented to us directly by the all-knowing author of the novel, and also sometimes bits of conversation or dialogue between the characters.

Mrs. Woolf’s Concern in writing novels was not merely to narrate a story as the older novelists did, but to discover and record life as the people feel who live it. Hence it is she rejected the conventional technique of narration and adopted a new technique more suited to her purposes. It is for this reason that in ‘To The Lighthouse’ she did not tell a story, in the sense of a series of events, and has concentrated on a small number of characters, whose nature and feelings are represented to us largely through their interior monologues. In order to capture the inner reality, the truth about life, she has tried to represent the moving current of life and the individual’s consciousness of the fleeting movement, and secondly, also to select from this current and organize it so that the novel may penetrate beneath the surface reality and may give to the reader a sense of understanding and completeness.

The readers are not placed directly within the minds of characters, as in the modern psychological novel, but the central intelligence of the novelist is constantly at work as the narrator, controlling and organizing the material, and illuminating it with its comments, and order emerges out of chaos. The interior monologues of the different characters are, no doubt, given, but the novelist, the central intelligence, is also constantly busy, organizing the material and illuminating it by frequent comments. In this respect Mrs. Woolf’s technique of narration is quite different from that of the “Stream of Consciousness” novelists. Far from being a stream of Consciousness novel, ’To the Lighthouse’ is the objective account of a central intelligence that approaches and assumes the characters. Consciousness, but does not become completely identified with any one consciousness. This central intelligence is thus free to comment upon the whole in what seems a completely impersonal manner, as this short passage shows:

“It is a triumph’ said Mr. Bankes, laying his knife down for a moment. He had eaten attentively. It was rich; it was tender. It was perfectly cooked. How did she manage these things in the depths of the country? He asked her. She was a wonderful woman. All his love, all his reverence, had returned; and she knew it.”

“It is a French recipe of my grandmother’s said Mrs. Ramsay, Speaking with a ring of great pleasure in her voice. Of course it was French. What passes for cookery in England is an abominations; it is pulling cabbages in water. It is roasting meat until it is like leather. It is cutting off the delicious skins of vegetables. ’In which’, said Mr. Bankes,

“All the virtue of vegetables is contained” Here the central intelligence is reporting a part of the dinner Conversation.
Suspense and Curiosity are another aspect of Mrs. Woolf’s technique of narration. She taking us into the middle of scene; Mrs. Ramsay’s opening remark is the answer to unstated question, which we have to supply by picking up clues from what follows. The reader’s natural curiosity thus becomes involved. We wonder who these people are, what they are talking about and so on. As we read on, prompted by this desire to know, we begin to recognize a pattern in the narrative at same time as we assimilate names, facts, ideas. Then, too, the pattern begins to establish itself; the pattern that is, of Conversation and reaction, of the actual words in the first person and the present tense, and the reflections of the characters in the third person and the past tense. This violence of feeling is seen first in the child, James and seems natural to the exaggeration of childhood; we are thus prepared in an acceptable way for the emotions of the adult character, Tempe real by age and experience, but made more complex too.

The third person narration is a very Common novel device used by Virginia Woolf. She is very careful to mock her direction of the narrative as little noticed as possible. Her use of direct speech for the interior monologues of her characters makes it easy for her to work into these mental soliloquies a number of statements and ideas which are outside the range of knowledge of character she is dealing with.

When, for example, at the beginning, she describes the feelings of James about his father, she moves from what the child is thinking to what Mrs. Ramsay habitually did and said, through impersonal sentences:

“Had there been an ate handy, a poker, or any weapon that would have gashed a hole in his father’s breast and killed him, there and then James would have seized it. Such were the extremes of emotion that Mr. Ramsay excited in his children’s breasts by his mere presence : Standing: disillusioning his son and casting ridicule upon his wife, who was ten thousand times better in every way than he was (James thought), but also with some secret conceit at his own accuracy of judgment. What he said was true. It was always true. He Was incapable of untruth; never tampered with a fact; never altered a disagreeable word to suit the pleasure or convenience of any mortal being, least of all of his own children, who sprung from his loins, should be aware from childhood that life is difficult…….”

We can see the two currents of thoughts flowing together. Just as this third person narration makes it possible for Virginia Woolf to move smoothly from one character to another, so in the novel as a whole it is a unifying Principle.

The completion of the circle is another quality of Virginia Woolf. If the arrival at the lighthouse and the completion of Lily Briscoe’s picture complete the circle of the book, and if Time Passes forms a sort of landing between the upward movements of The Window and the downward, resolving movements of The Lighthouse, we find here the same structural design. The Part I conforms to this design. Section II, when the fairy tale is finished and James has gone, a perfect moment, rich with solitude and revelation, certainly forms a peak that communicates its exaltation to the second half of the chapter, which however, never reaches the same intensity at this may moment.

To sum up, Virginia Woolf has employed the lighthouse as a symbol and it has a number of undertones of meaning, and serves the purpose of a unifying factor in the novel. The action moves on normal constructional lines from scene to scene and from the mind of one person to that of another. These shifts from one consciousness to another and these movements are made further easy by allowing every incident to take place in a close knit homogenous world. ’To The Lighthouse’ is a masterpiece of Construction. It is an organic whole. It is a great work of art which fully deserves the praises that have been lavished on it.