LITERATURE ANALYSIS #1

1.  I read To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf.  It was divided into three parts called "The Window," "Time Passes," and "The Lighthouse."  On the surface, the plot is very straightforward, but in the novel, the main events are interlaced with descriptions of multiple philosophical conflicts and solutions in each of the characters.  The story takes place in a summer home on a bay where the Ramsay family stays while entertaining many guests.  In the first part, James Ramsay, the smallest Ramsay child, wants to go to a lighthouse across the bay the next day.  His mother says yes, if the weather permits it.  To this, his father chimes in that the weather won't be fit for sailing tomorrow, crushing James' hope of going to the lighthouse.  Later that same day, Mrs. Ramsay goes to town with "an atheist" named Charles Tansley, who falls slightly in love with her, as do some of the other male guests staying at the home.  In the evening, Mrs. Ramsay poses for a painting for a woman named Lily Briscoe, who does not want to fulfill the conventional female role of the time of marrying and serving to stroke the ego of men.  Mrs. Ramsay also awaits the return of a couple that she matched up because she suspects that they have gotten engaged.  When the group returns, dinner is served and the once distant characters seem to bond with candlelight saving them from the dark uncertainty outside of the house.  Mrs. Ramsay and Mr. Ramsay's relationship is very strained.  He has a temper, but he also has a side that needs to be sympathized by Mrs. Ramsay for him to achieve complete self-confidence.  The second part of the book condenses ten years into about twenty pages.  The housekeeper Mrs. McNab tries to handle the upkeep when Mrs. Ramsay dies suddenly.  Eventually she can't handle it, and everything becomes overgrown or moldy.  Both of Mrs. Ramsay's two older children, with whom she took pride in their futures, die, one from childbirth complications and the other in World War I.  After ten years, Lily Briscoe and another former guest return to the house.  The third part starts in the morning, as if it is the morning after that dinner in the first part and no time has elapsed.  Lily Briscoe goes out to redo the painting that she had attempted a decade ago, this time succeeding in capturing it to her liking because she has had some distance from it to really understand what she was painting. Meanwhile, Mr. Ramsay takes an older James and his sister out to the Lighthouse, where his children see that he has changed over ten years, and they understand him better than they did ten years before, despising him less.  With this novel, Woolf intended to demonstrate that our perspectives of the world and the people in it can be altered with a little distance, like a decade of processing the personality of a person, as Lily did with Mrs. Ramsay.




2.  The theme of the novel is that in life, we will never be able to view something from an unbiased perspective.  Throughout the book, Woolf switches between the  perspectives of any of the characters mentioned in the book to show how there can be so many different interpretations of the world.

3.  The tone of the first part is hopeful and excited with quotes like,"The faintest light was on her face, as if the glow of Minta opposite, some excitement, some anticipation of happiness was reflected in her, as if the sun of the love of men and women rose over the rim of the table-cloth, and without knowing what it was she bent towards it and greeted it.  The second part has an ominous tone, as the passage exemplifies which describes the darkness at night during those ten years, with "Nothing stirred in the drawing-room or in the dining-room or on the staircase.  Only through the rusty hinges and swollen sea-moistened woodwork certain airs, detached from the body of the wind...crept round corners and ventured indoors."  The third part of the book develops a reflective tone.  Most of the surviving characters, in this part, reflect on their relationships with other characters in the novel and reassess each other after ten years.  Lily Briscoe realizes that she has changed from despising Mrs. Ramsay to admiring her lifestyle, and James realizes that his father, like him, is just a victim of his feelings, and has changed for the better in ten years.

4.  Virginia Woolf implements many literary techniques in the novel to illustrate the actions and appearances of characters and to describe abstract, philosophical concepts to the reader in a way that they may understand.
Simile - "Standing, as now, lean as a knife, narrow as the blade of one..."  (Describing Mr. Ramsay)(Page 10)
"As stealthily as stags" (Describing the movement of the children)(Page 16)
Imagery - "While the sun poured into those attics, which a plank alonen separated from each other so that every footstep could be plainly heard and the Swiss girl sobbing for her father who was dying of cancer in a valley of the Grisons, adn lit up bats, flannels, straw hats, ink-pots, paint-pots, beetles, and the skulls of small birds, while it drew from the long frilled strips of seaweed pinned to the wall a smell of salt and weeds, which was in the towels too, gritty with sand from bathing." (Page 16)
Connotation - "Standing, as now, lean as a knife, narrow as the blade of one..." (Woolf compares Mr. Ramsay's appearance to a knife, which has a negative connotation, leaving the reader with a negative impression of Mr. Ramsay.)(Page 10)
Metaphor - "Mr. Carmichael,who was basking with his yellow cat's eyes ajar, so that like a cat's they seemed to reflect the branches moving or the clouds passing, but to give no inkling of any inner thoughts or emotion whatsoever..." (Compares Mr. Carmichael's eyes with those of a cat's)(Page 19)
"While for the first time in his life, Charles Tansey felt an extraordinary pride; a man digging in a drain stopped digging and looked at her; for the first time in his life Charles Tansey felt an extraordinary pride..." (Page 25)
Anaphora - "Embraced them all, without need of words, in a vast and benevolent lethargy of well-wishing; all the house; all the world; all the people in it..." (Emphasizing Mr. Carmichael's attitude towards the world)(Page 19)
Stream-of-Consciousness - This technique makes the reader connect with the characters by detailing their thought processes.
"He was an awful prig - oh, yes, an insufferable bore...till she gathered that he had got back entire self-confidence, had recovered form the circus and was about (and now again she liked him warmly) to tell her..." (Illustrates how inside the mind, thoughts interrupt thoughts and produce side thoughts, like asides in a play)(Page 22-23)
"His eyes, glazed with emotion, defiant with tragic intensity, met theirs for a second, and trembled on the verge of recognition; but then, raising his hand, half-way to his face as if to avert, to brush off, in an agony of peevish shame, their normal gaze, as if he begged them to withhold for a moment what he knew to be inevitable, as if he impressed upon them his own child-like resentment of interruption, yet even in the moment of discovery was not to be routed utterly, but was determined to hold fast to something of this delicious emotion, this impure rhapsody of which he was ashamed, but in which he revelled..." (Thought process of Mr. Ramsay)(Page 41)
Personification - Woolf uses this technique mainly to describe scenery that seems to have a mind of its own
"The green sand dunes with the wild flowing grasses on them, which always seemed to be running away into some moon country..." (Page 23)
"Nothing, it seemed, could survive the flood, the profusion of darkness which, creeping in at keyholes and crevices, stole round window blinds, came into bedrooms, swallowed up here a jug and a basin..." (Page 190)
"Moreover, softened and acquiescent, the spring with her bees humming and gnats dancing threw her cloak about her, veiled her eyes, averted her head, and among passing shadows and flights of small rain seemed to have taken upon her knowledge of the sorrows of mankind."  (Page 199)
Point of View - In To the Lighthouse, the point of view is third person omniscient.  The voice of the narrator changes between many characters, but "I" is never used in any of their thoughts.  The structure is always he or she thought this.
"James Ramsay...endowed the picture of the refrigerator, as his mother spoke, with heavenly bliss," (Page 9) and five pages later the reader gets a look inside of Mrs. Ramsay's mind instead of James's with "Surely, he had said enough.  She wished they would both leave her and James alone and go on talking." (Page 15)
"They both felt a common hilarity, excited by the moving waves...both of them looked at the dunes far away, and instead of merriment felt come over them some sadness..." (Describing the emotions of both William Bankes and Lily Briscoe)(Page 34)
Literary Allusion - Mr. Ramsay repeats the line "Some one had blundered" over and over again in the first part of the novel.  The reader is expected to know that this is a reference to the poem "The Charge of the Light Brigade" by Alfred Tennyson, otherwise the theme of death that is represented by the poem and the repetition of the quote is lost on the reader.
Rhetorical Questions - Many of the rhetorical questions in the novel are in a character's thoughts, showing what they contemplate and what they are curious about or can't understand.
"But was it nothing but looks, people said?  What was there behind it - her beauty and splendour?...Or was there nothing? nothing but incomparable beauty which she lived behind, and could do nothing to disturb?" (Thoughts on Mrs. Ramsay's sadness)(Page 46)
"So Mr. Tansley supposed she meant him to see that that the man's picture was skimpy, was that what one said? The colors weren't solid? Was that what one said?"  (Page 24)

CHARACTERIZATION:
1.  Direct Characterization - "She had the whole other sex under her protection...finally for an attitude towards herself which no woman could fail to feel or to find agreeable, something trustful, childlike, reverential..." (Characterizing Mrs. Ramsay)(Page 13)
"He was such a miserable specimen...all humps and hollows.  He couldn't play cricket; he poked; he shuffled.  He was a sarcastic brute...they knew what he liked best - to be for ever walking up and down, up and down, with Mr. Ramsay..." (Characterizing Charles Tansey)(Page 15)
Indirect Characterization - " 'But,' said his father, stopping in front of the drawing-room window, 'it won't be fine.'  Had there been an axe handy, or a poker, 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..." (Page 10)
" 'But it may be fine - I expect it will be fine,' said Mrs. Ramsay, making some little twist of the reddish brown stocking she was knitting impatiently."  (Mr. Ramsay frustrates Mrs. Ramsay, and she disapproves of his crushing of James's hope to go to the lighthouse the next day)(Page 11)
Virginia Woolf used a lot of indirect characterization because she changed the perspective of the book so many times that it allows the reader to see how the same character is viewed by multiple other characters.  The direct characterization in the novel mainly has the purpose to describe Mrs. Ramsay's appearance, so that if the reader is going to connect with any character, then they will connect with Mrs. Ramsay, with knowledge of her inner thoughts and her outer appearances.

2.  Yes, when Virginia Woolf focuses on a character in To the Lighthouse, she changes the perspective of the novel to illustrate that character's innermost thoughts and feelings at the time.  Sometimes the illustrated thought process is different from character to character.  There are no distinct accents in To the Lighthouse that would separate the characters, however, as there is not even much dialogue.  Most of the To the Lighthouse is focused on the characters' contemplation of many different events and ideas, rather than the dialogue and interactions between the characters.

3.  The protagonist of the story isn't clear, but I would choose Lily Briscoe as the character that comes the closes to being the protagonist.  Lily is a dynamic and round character.  The reader is allowed to learn her innermost thoughts and feelings in the first part of the novel and to compare those same thoughts and feelings to her mindset in the third part of the book, a decade later.  Her confidence in her lifestyle choice as an unmarried woman increases by the end of the book, and this is reflected in her ability to suddenly paint the scene around her with fervor and determination and better than what she had attempted to paint ten years ago.

4.  After reading the book, I feel like I have met a group of characters.  Even though I admire Virginia Woolf's radical idea to exemplify the purpose of her novel through its structure, when she changed the perspective of the book to that of different characters, I didn't get the necessary time with each or with one of them to connect to the character.  It was more like I was sampling the personality and inner motivation of each character, without ever having time to connect to other parts of the character.