TWG CXLII - A Storm of Hard and Boiled [Game Thread]

[Red Blaster]

Welp

[Clownpiece]

Plew.

[DaBackpack]

Plop is the hero we deserve, but not the one we need right now

[DaBackpack]

Originally Posted by MrPopadopalis25

In Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, the relationship between human consciousness and the inexorable flow of time constitutes a significant portion of the overall thematic content of the text. Time is represented as a force that the characters of the novel are constantly and unavoidably in conflict against. In their unstable existences, where the present is “already the past” (Woolf 90) and the future becomes a question of “[w]ho could tell what was going to last” (87), time erodes the permanence or objective truths that they strive to either obtain or hold onto. I begin with a close reading of the narrative to demonstrate the inability of the human consciousness to reconcile the past, the present, and the future into something of permanence before moving to a discussion of how the representation of conscious thought is impossible for Woolf or any other author to accomplish without creating a discrepancy between story time and discourse time. I then conclude with the argument that Woolf, keenly aware of this unavoidable discrepancy, models the structure and the tempo of her text in a way that further deepens its thematic content.

While time is perceived by the human consciousness to be sequential – that the past and the future are linearly connected and through the vehicle of the present we move from one end of the spectrum to the other – the subjective process of introspection that occurs within the minds of To the Lighthouse's characters regards the past, the present, and the future as all being coterminous with one another. For them, fragments of the past and hopes for the future inform their present states of being, and yet, paradoxically, the external flow of time ensures that the past is unreachable, the present is ephemeral, and the future will eradicate all.

Often times the past is more positively appraised by the characters in contrast to their presents or their futures, and it is through this difference of appraisal that the flow of time is marked as being in conflict with human consciousness. Take, for example, when Mr Bankes recalls that Mr Ramsay “had made a definite contribution to philosophy in one little book when he was only five and twenty; what came after was more or less amplification, repetition” (23). Mr Ramsay made a “definite” contribution to the field of philosophy, and the reason that this is perceived as worthwhile by Mr Bankes and Mr Ramsay is precisely because of its definitiveness, because it is something that is relatively solid and possesses some degree of staying power. Forced to live in a context where time is akin to “the sea [that] eats away the ground we stand on” (38), Mr Ramsay's book is valued because it is a legitimizing product of the human consciousness that is graspable, something tangible and not yet worn down by the erosion of amplification and repetition that the flow of time levies on both Mr Ramsay as well as his text. Similarly, compare Mr Ramsay's contribution to the philosophical canon to the fact that “[y]ears ago, before he had married, [...] he had walked all day” (57). Walking is a symbol of motion and freedom, of being able to navigate the world as one deems fit, but this freedom is eventually denied by time: “He was too old now to walk all day long with a biscuit in his pocket” (57, emphasis added). Because the present is “already the past” (90), the past is valued because it makes something permanent of the moment, even if said permanence is only temporary and continually reassessed in light of new experiences and conclusions.

If permanence or objective truth is what the characters seek to obtain, then it follows that the present, which by definition is only momentary, functions as the stage upon which the battle against the flow of time is waged. During the dinner scene in The Window, the narrative says that Mr Bankes “thought that if he had been alone dinner would have been almost over now; he would have been free to work. Yes, he thought, it is a terrible waste of time” (73). By creating a dynamic between his own personal work – which, like Mr Ramsay's philosophical writings, offer a degree of permanence – and the social responsibility of dining with his fellow houseguests, Mr Bankes assigns a differing degree of importance to each act, and this importance is determined based on the context of time. If Mr Bankes had had enough time to both enjoy the dinner party and work on his writings then he would not have had to make the distinction that one “is a terrible waste of time” compared to the other. The present is assigned a high degree of importance because of its potential to oppose the silencing effects of time's unceasing forward march. Moments in which the present becomes threatened by the imposing future are abundant in To the Lighthouse, ranging from being as forthright as Mrs Ramsay not wanting “James to grow a day older or Cam either” (49) or as subversive as Minta, Paul, Nancy, and Andrew thinking that “it would be fatal to let the tide come in and cover up all the good hunting-grounds before they got on to the beach” (62). High and low tide are time-based phenomenons, occurring in estimable and sequential phases, and are thus unavoidable for the beach-faring foursome. The tide, like the flow of time, is a condition which they must account for when they decide what to make of and how to proceed from their present situations. Recovering “the brooch which [Minta's] grandmother had fastened her cap with till the last day of her life” (63) is ascribed with the utmost importance because “[t]he tide was coming in fast” and “[t]he sea would cover the place where they had sat in a minute” (64, emphasis added). The brooch is a symbol of the past that is significant to Minta's present but is threatened to be lost in the present due to the inevitable advancement of the tide, which is described using the language of time.

As is the case with the present, time's unhindered advancement also threatens the futures of the characters insofar that one day everything that they strive to make permanent will become the past, undone and forgotten. The sand dunes invoke a feeling of sadness in Mr Bankes and Lily “because distant views seem to outlast by a million years (Lily thought) the gazer and to be communing already with a sky which beholds an earth entirely at rest” (20). Though she strives to capture fleeting moments in the permanence of her artwork, Lily thinks of “an earth entirely at rest,” one where human influence and society is no longer be relevant and all that remains is an unfeeling and unthinking landscape. Indeed, how can Lily Briscoe make something lasting out of herself and her artwork when one day there will be no humanity left to remember her? And what then is the point in attempting to make “definitive contributions” (23) in anything if in the end nobody “could tell what was going to last – in literature or indeed in anything else” (87)? Unable to retrieve the past, constantly at odds in trying to make the most of a present that at once becomes the past, and faced with the hopelessness that the future will forget them all and thus render the entirety of their lives a meaningless and “terrible waste of time” (73), the internal conflict against time in which all characters must be participant is one of great thematic concern to the text.

Since To the Lighthouse represents human consciousness and thought processes as bound to but nevertheless existing outside of sequential time – where past, present, and future exist and are judged in simultaneity with one another – it follows then that the representations of conscious thought in language cannot follow sequential story time as the discourse time required to translate nonverbal thought into the written word is not equivalent to the seconds or minutes in which these thoughts actually occur. Woolf utilizes a limited omniscient third person point of view, where the characters' consciousnesses make subjective appraisals of their reality which become represented in the narration through free indirect discourse. No one voice is permitted to dominate, and multiple truths may exist in tandem even if they contradict the others. In order to give equal weighting to the multiple internal dialogues that occur at the same time as one another, Woolf must pause the story time in order to explore the subjective appraisals of every relevant participant in a matter before moving forwards. Consider the moment near the onset of the text when Lily and Mr Bankes are pontificating on the topic of Mr Ramsay and Lily suddenly feels as if “the load of her accumulated impressions of [Mr Bankes] tilted up, and down poured in a ponderous avalanche all she felt about him” (23). The narration then goes on to describe the various sensations that Lily feels with respect to her relationship with Mr Bankes, but these sensations are said to occur “simultaneously” (23). If the average reader reads Woolf's prose at a pace of two hundred words per minute and the word count of the section that represents the torrent of conscious thought that Lily experiences is just short of that, then the sixty or so seconds that it would take to read the various strands of thought runs contrary to the rapidity in which they actually occur in both Lily's mind as well as the story's chronological time frame. Moments such as this, where the tempo of Woolf's text assumes that of a stretch or a pause, are necessitated if the mimesis of conscious thought is to be explored. Likewise, at another point Mr Ramsay is described as speaking “[v]ery humbly, at length” (29), yet the lengthiness of his speech is confined to the two word description of “at length.” Like Lily's paintings, which favor subjective representation over facsimile duplication, story time must be subordinate to discourse time when a limited omniscient third person point of view is utilized. However, this is not to assert that discourse time and story time do not ever coincide. It is not a coincidence that during the dinner party Mr Ramsay is said to have “hated everything dragging on for hours like this” (78) when chapter seventeen of The Window, which is when the dinner party occurs, is the lengthiest in terms of discourse time. Similarly, direct descriptions of action reject verbosity in order to equalize discourse time and story time: “He had put on his spectacles. He had stepped back. He had raised his hand. He had slightly narrowed his clear blue eyes” (44).

Rather than allow the inability to accurately represent human consciousness in language in a way that remains faithful to both story time and discourse time act as a blight on her text, Woolf instead utilizes the formal structure and discourse of To the Lighthouse to deepen its thematic content and even further indite time as being an antagonist to human life. The narrative is presented in three sections that are of varying length and style. The first and the last sections, The Window and The Lighthouse, are longer in terms of discourse time than Time Passes, yet the story time of The Window and The Lighthouse spans less than a single day while Time Passes condenses an entire ten year period into a brief flicker, only 8% of the text's total word count. Woolf makes extensive use of the stretch and pause tempos in the first and last sections in order to legitimate the individual, demonstrating through the form of the text that human consciousness through its representation in language is deemed to be more important than the representation of the external events that are also taking place. The flow of time is paused, just as the characters desire it to be. In Time Passes, however, the tempo shifts to that of ellipses and summaries, where time flows uninhibitedly and the psychological conditions of the characters are demurred in comparison to the external events that occur.

Amongst the many different elements of fiction that Woolf employs in order to accomplish this contrast between the three sections, one of the most poignant examples is her use of parenthesis. In The Window, representations of consciousness are bestowed with prime importance since the majority of statements concerning external events are relegated to parenthesis. Consider the moment where Mrs Ramsay measures the stocking against James' leg and her various strands of thoughts during this moment constitute the narration of the scene: “disgraceful to say, she had never read them. And Croom on the Mind and Bates on the Savage Customs of Polynesia ('My dear, stand still,' she said)” (25). By placing the external event in parenthesis, Mrs Ramsay's ruminations on Croom and Bates are assigned a greater degree of significance than the act of measuring the stocking is. This is true of The Lighthouse section as well, where external events such as when “Macalister's boy took one of the fish and cut a square out of its side to bait his hook with” (148) are also placed in parenthesis. Compare these moments of parenthesis usage to those present in Time Passes, where lengthy, verbose descriptions of the seasons and the effects that they engender on the physical landscape are on the outside of the parenthesis but statements such as “Prue Ramsay died that summer in some illness connected with childbirth” (108) or “[t]wenty or thirty young men were blown up in France, among them Andrew Ramsay, whose death, mercifully, was instantaneous” (109) are brief in discourse time and confined between the brackets. The flow of time, here marked by the description of the changing seasons, continues on uninhibitedly while the human consciousnesses which were once held in high enough regard to override descriptions of external events are now kept brief and impersonal, demoted to mere footnotes in the overall course of history. Moreover, describing Andrew's “instantaneous” death as merciful highlights yet again that time is at odds with humanity.

On a more formal level, the three part structure of To the Lighthouse contributes to the text's thematic content through its resemblance to an evening that passes into night before returning again to day. Stylistically, the longer lengths of The Window and The Lighthouse relative to Time Passes can be interpreted as a reflection on the dissimilarity between night and day. At one point in Time Passes the narrative states that “the stillness and the brightness of the day were as strange as the chaos and tumult of night, with the trees standing there, and the flowers standing there, looking before them, looking up, yet beholding nothing, eyeless, and thus terrible” (110). The “stillness” of the day is compared to “the chaos and tumult” of the night – contrast this description to the “stillness” of the pauses and stretches in The Window and The Lighthouse, both set during the day, to the chaos of the ellipses and summaries that appear during the “downpouring of immense darkness” (103) in Time Passes. Daytime is said to contain a quality of “brightness” or illumination, which symbolically allows people to see and thus discern their reality, yet the privileging of human consciousness that occurs during the day is snubbed by the “eyeless, and thus terrible” flow of time characteristic of the night. Similarly, the eponymous lighthouse, itself a symbol of illumination and guidance as well, sits upon an island that bears an unmistakable resemblance to the three part structure of the narrative: “It lay like that on the sea, did it, with a dent in the middle and two sharp crags, and the sea swept in there” (154). Like the island and the lighthouse that sit atop the sea, so too do The Window and The Lighthouse situate themselves above the flow of time; and like the dent in the middle of the island that the sea sweeps through, so too does the flow of time corrode humanity in Time Passes. In addition, the darkness and the tumult of Time Passes is as inherently bound to the flow of time as it is to the First World War. The section opens with a discussion of a terrible storm that is “coming up from the beach” (105), thus marking it as a foreign intrusion, as well as the statement that “[o]ne by one the lamps were all extinguished” (105) which harkens images of wartime blackouts. The section continues with descriptions of gendered violence, with Andrew succumbing to conscription and Prue passing away during the domestic act of childbirth, before concluding with the statement that “indeed peace had come” (116) which then dates The Lighthouse as occurring “in September” (116) 1919, after the armistice and Treaty of Versailles brought both the war as well as Time Passes to their end.

In conclusion, To the Lighthouse portrays the relationship between human consciousness and the flow of time as one that is always in conflict, where characters struggle in vain to gain anything of permanence in a world that slips away and changes with each passing second. Beyond the narrative, this conflict is also reflected in the form of the work to the extent that representations of conscious thought in language create a disparity between discourse time and story time that cannot be reconciled. However, this disparity ultimately works to the text's benefit as the psychological representation of time in The Window and The Lighthouse is contrasted by the chronological representation featured in Time Passes, where developments concerning major characters are undercut by their brevity as well as their confinement between parentheses. The symbolism of day and night also connects the structure of the text to its thematic content, as does its relevance to World War I. Time is the enemy of human consciousness, and neither Mrs Ramsay nor Virginia Woolf nor we ourselves are exempt from its effects.

I would like to fact-check your references. Which publication of the story did you use?

[Clownpiece]

[DaBackpack]

Originally Posted by MrPopadopalis25

In Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, the relationship between human consciousness and the inexorable flow of time constitutes a significant portion of the overall thematic content of the text. Time is represented as a force that the characters of the novel are constantly and unavoidably in conflict against. In their unstable existences, where the present is “already the past” (Woolf 90) and the future becomes a question of “[w]ho could tell what was going to last” (87), time erodes the permanence or objective truths that they strive to either obtain or hold onto. I begin with a close reading of the narrative to demonstrate the inability of the human consciousness to reconcile the past, the present, and the future into something of permanence before moving to a discussion of how the representation of conscious thought is impossible for Woolf or any other author to accomplish without creating a discrepancy between story time and discourse time. I then conclude with the argument that Woolf, keenly aware of this unavoidable discrepancy, models the structure and the tempo of her text in a way that further deepens its thematic content.

While time is perceived by the human consciousness to be sequential – that the past and the future are linearly connected and through the vehicle of the present we move from one end of the spectrum to the other – the subjective process of introspection that occurs within the minds of To the Lighthouse's characters regards the past, the present, and the future as all being coterminous with one another. For them, fragments of the past and hopes for the future inform their present states of being, and yet, paradoxically, the external flow of time ensures that the past is unreachable, the present is ephemeral, and the future will eradicate all.

Often times the past is more positively appraised by the characters in contrast to their presents or their futures, and it is through this difference of appraisal that the flow of time is marked as being in conflict with human consciousness. Take, for example, when Mr Bankes recalls that Mr Ramsay “had made a definite contribution to philosophy in one little book when he was only five and twenty; what came after was more or less amplification, repetition” (23). Mr Ramsay made a “definite” contribution to the field of philosophy, and the reason that this is perceived as worthwhile by Mr Bankes and Mr Ramsay is precisely because of its definitiveness, because it is something that is relatively solid and possesses some degree of staying power. Forced to live in a context where time is akin to “the sea [that] eats away the ground we stand on” (38), Mr Ramsay's book is valued because it is a legitimizing product of the human consciousness that is graspable, something tangible and not yet worn down by the erosion of amplification and repetition that the flow of time levies on both Mr Ramsay as well as his text. Similarly, compare Mr Ramsay's contribution to the philosophical canon to the fact that “[y]ears ago, before he had married, [...] he had walked all day” (57). Walking is a symbol of motion and freedom, of being able to navigate the world as one deems fit, but this freedom is eventually denied by time: “He was too old now to walk all day long with a biscuit in his pocket” (57, emphasis added). Because the present is “already the past” (90), the past is valued because it makes something permanent of the moment, even if said permanence is only temporary and continually reassessed in light of new experiences and conclusions.

If permanence or objective truth is what the characters seek to obtain, then it follows that the present, which by definition is only momentary, functions as the stage upon which the battle against the flow of time is waged. During the dinner scene in The Window, the narrative says that Mr Bankes “thought that if he had been alone dinner would have been almost over now; he would have been free to work. Yes, he thought, it is a terrible waste of time” (73). By creating a dynamic between his own personal work – which, like Mr Ramsay's philosophical writings, offer a degree of permanence – and the social responsibility of dining with his fellow houseguests, Mr Bankes assigns a differing degree of importance to each act, and this importance is determined based on the context of time. If Mr Bankes had had enough time to both enjoy the dinner party and work on his writings then he would not have had to make the distinction that one “is a terrible waste of time” compared to the other. The present is assigned a high degree of importance because of its potential to oppose the silencing effects of time's unceasing forward march. Moments in which the present becomes threatened by the imposing future are abundant in To the Lighthouse, ranging from being as forthright as Mrs Ramsay not wanting “James to grow a day older or Cam either” (49) or as subversive as Minta, Paul, Nancy, and Andrew thinking that “it would be fatal to let the tide come in and cover up all the good hunting-grounds before they got on to the beach” (62). High and low tide are time-based phenomenons, occurring in estimable and sequential phases, and are thus unavoidable for the beach-faring foursome. The tide, like the flow of time, is a condition which they must account for when they decide what to make of and how to proceed from their present situations. Recovering “the brooch which [Minta's] grandmother had fastened her cap with till the last day of her life” (63) is ascribed with the utmost importance because “[t]he tide was coming in fast” and “[t]he sea would cover the place where they had sat in a minute” (64, emphasis added). The brooch is a symbol of the past that is significant to Minta's present but is threatened to be lost in the present due to the inevitable advancement of the tide, which is described using the language of time.

As is the case with the present, time's unhindered advancement also threatens the futures of the characters insofar that one day everything that they strive to make permanent will become the past, undone and forgotten. The sand dunes invoke a feeling of sadness in Mr Bankes and Lily “because distant views seem to outlast by a million years (Lily thought) the gazer and to be communing already with a sky which beholds an earth entirely at rest” (20). Though she strives to capture fleeting moments in the permanence of her artwork, Lily thinks of “an earth entirely at rest,” one where human influence and society is no longer be relevant and all that remains is an unfeeling and unthinking landscape. Indeed, how can Lily Briscoe make something lasting out of herself and her artwork when one day there will be no humanity left to remember her? And what then is the point in attempting to make “definitive contributions” (23) in anything if in the end nobody “could tell what was going to last – in literature or indeed in anything else” (87)? Unable to retrieve the past, constantly at odds in trying to make the most of a present that at once becomes the past, and faced with the hopelessness that the future will forget them all and thus render the entirety of their lives a meaningless and “terrible waste of time” (73), the internal conflict against time in which all characters must be participant is one of great thematic concern to the text.

Since To the Lighthouse represents human consciousness and thought processes as bound to but nevertheless existing outside of sequential time – where past, present, and future exist and are judged in simultaneity with one another – it follows then that the representations of conscious thought in language cannot follow sequential story time as the discourse time required to translate nonverbal thought into the written word is not equivalent to the seconds or minutes in which these thoughts actually occur. Woolf utilizes a limited omniscient third person point of view, where the characters' consciousnesses make subjective appraisals of their reality which become represented in the narration through free indirect discourse. No one voice is permitted to dominate, and multiple truths may exist in tandem even if they contradict the others. In order to give equal weighting to the multiple internal dialogues that occur at the same time as one another, Woolf must pause the story time in order to explore the subjective appraisals of every relevant participant in a matter before moving forwards. Consider the moment near the onset of the text when Lily and Mr Bankes are pontificating on the topic of Mr Ramsay and Lily suddenly feels as if “the load of her accumulated impressions of [Mr Bankes] tilted up, and down poured in a ponderous avalanche all she felt about him” (23). The narration then goes on to describe the various sensations that Lily feels with respect to her relationship with Mr Bankes, but these sensations are said to occur “simultaneously” (23). If the average reader reads Woolf's prose at a pace of two hundred words per minute and the word count of the section that represents the torrent of conscious thought that Lily experiences is just short of that, then the sixty or so seconds that it would take to read the various strands of thought runs contrary to the rapidity in which they actually occur in both Lily's mind as well as the story's chronological time frame. Moments such as this, where the tempo of Woolf's text assumes that of a stretch or a pause, are necessitated if the mimesis of conscious thought is to be explored. Likewise, at another point Mr Ramsay is described as speaking “[v]ery humbly, at length” (29), yet the lengthiness of his speech is confined to the two word description of “at length.” Like Lily's paintings, which favor subjective representation over facsimile duplication, story time must be subordinate to discourse time when a limited omniscient third person point of view is utilized. However, this is not to assert that discourse time and story time do not ever coincide. It is not a coincidence that during the dinner party Mr Ramsay is said to have “hated everything dragging on for hours like this” (78) when chapter seventeen of The Window, which is when the dinner party occurs, is the lengthiest in terms of discourse time. Similarly, direct descriptions of action reject verbosity in order to equalize discourse time and story time: “He had put on his spectacles. He had stepped back. He had raised his hand. He had slightly narrowed his clear blue eyes” (44).

Rather than allow the inability to accurately represent human consciousness in language in a way that remains faithful to both story time and discourse time act as a blight on her text, Woolf instead utilizes the formal structure and discourse of To the Lighthouse to deepen its thematic content and even further indite time as being an antagonist to human life. The narrative is presented in three sections that are of varying length and style. The first and the last sections, The Window and The Lighthouse, are longer in terms of discourse time than Time Passes, yet the story time of The Window and The Lighthouse spans less than a single day while Time Passes condenses an entire ten year period into a brief flicker, only 8% of the text's total word count. Woolf makes extensive use of the stretch and pause tempos in the first and last sections in order to legitimate the individual, demonstrating through the form of the text that human consciousness through its representation in language is deemed to be more important than the representation of the external events that are also taking place. The flow of time is paused, just as the characters desire it to be. In Time Passes, however, the tempo shifts to that of ellipses and summaries, where time flows uninhibitedly and the psychological conditions of the characters are demurred in comparison to the external events that occur.

Amongst the many different elements of fiction that Woolf employs in order to accomplish this contrast between the three sections, one of the most poignant examples is her use of parenthesis. In The Window, representations of consciousness are bestowed with prime importance since the majority of statements concerning external events are relegated to parenthesis. Consider the moment where Mrs Ramsay measures the stocking against James' leg and her various strands of thoughts during this moment constitute the narration of the scene: “disgraceful to say, she had never read them. And Croom on the Mind and Bates on the Savage Customs of Polynesia ('My dear, stand still,' she said)” (25). By placing the external event in parenthesis, Mrs Ramsay's ruminations on Croom and Bates are assigned a greater degree of significance than the act of measuring the stocking is. This is true of The Lighthouse section as well, where external events such as when “Macalister's boy took one of the fish and cut a square out of its side to bait his hook with” (148) are also placed in parenthesis. Compare these moments of parenthesis usage to those present in Time Passes, where lengthy, verbose descriptions of the seasons and the effects that they engender on the physical landscape are on the outside of the parenthesis but statements such as “Prue Ramsay died that summer in some illness connected with childbirth” (108) or “[t]wenty or thirty young men were blown up in France, among them Andrew Ramsay, whose death, mercifully, was instantaneous” (109) are brief in discourse time and confined between the brackets. The flow of time, here marked by the description of the changing seasons, continues on uninhibitedly while the human consciousnesses which were once held in high enough regard to override descriptions of external events are now kept brief and impersonal, demoted to mere footnotes in the overall course of history. Moreover, describing Andrew's “instantaneous” death as merciful highlights yet again that time is at odds with humanity.

On a more formal level, the three part structure of To the Lighthouse contributes to the text's thematic content through its resemblance to an evening that passes into night before returning again to day. Stylistically, the longer lengths of The Window and The Lighthouse relative to Time Passes can be interpreted as a reflection on the dissimilarity between night and day. At one point in Time Passes the narrative states that “the stillness and the brightness of the day were as strange as the chaos and tumult of night, with the trees standing there, and the flowers standing there, looking before them, looking up, yet beholding nothing, eyeless, and thus terrible” (110). The “stillness” of the day is compared to “the chaos and tumult” of the night – contrast this description to the “stillness” of the pauses and stretches in The Window and The Lighthouse, both set during the day, to the chaos of the ellipses and summaries that appear during the “downpouring of immense darkness” (103) in Time Passes. Daytime is said to contain a quality of “brightness” or illumination, which symbolically allows people to see and thus discern their reality, yet the privileging of human consciousness that occurs during the day is snubbed by the “eyeless, and thus terrible” flow of time characteristic of the night. Similarly, the eponymous lighthouse, itself a symbol of illumination and guidance as well, sits upon an island that bears an unmistakable resemblance to the three part structure of the narrative: “It lay like that on the sea, did it, with a dent in the middle and two sharp crags, and the sea swept in there” (154). Like the island and the lighthouse that sit atop the sea, so too do The Window and The Lighthouse situate themselves above the flow of time; and like the dent in the middle of the island that the sea sweeps through, so too does the flow of time corrode humanity in Time Passes. In addition, the darkness and the tumult of Time Passes is as inherently bound to the flow of time as it is to the First World War. The section opens with a discussion of a terrible storm that is “coming up from the beach” (105), thus marking it as a foreign intrusion, as well as the statement that “[o]ne by one the lamps were all extinguished” (105) which harkens images of wartime blackouts. The section continues with descriptions of gendered violence, with Andrew succumbing to conscription and Prue passing away during the domestic act of childbirth, before concluding with the statement that “indeed peace had come” (116) which then dates The Lighthouse as occurring “in September” (116) 1919, after the armistice and Treaty of Versailles brought both the war as well as Time Passes to their end.

In conclusion, To the Lighthouse portrays the relationship between human consciousness and the flow of time as one that is always in conflict, where characters struggle in vain to gain anything of permanence in a world that slips away and changes with each passing second. Beyond the narrative, this conflict is also reflected in the form of the work to the extent that representations of conscious thought in language create a disparity between discourse time and story time that cannot be reconciled. However, this disparity ultimately works to the text's benefit as the psychological representation of time in The Window and The Lighthouse is contrasted by the chronological representation featured in Time Passes, where developments concerning major characters are undercut by their brevity as well as their confinement between parentheses. The symbolism of day and night also connects the structure of the text to its thematic content, as does its relevance to World War I. Time is the enemy of human consciousness, and neither Mrs Ramsay nor Virginia Woolf nor we ourselves are exempt from its effects.

I mean, I just want to make sure you're not intentionally misrepresenting Woolf's work.

[Red Blaster]

Originally Posted by DaBackpack

Plop is the hero we deserve, but not the one we need right now

Originally Posted by DaBackpack

I need a hero

[Clownpiece]

I'm going to bed probably.

See you tomorrow.

[Red Blaster]

Probably

[XelNya]

Originally Posted by Clownpiece

Can't steal what was already mine.

YOU ARE A FUCKED MAN.

YOU HEAR ME.

Fucked I say.

[XelNya]

Originally Posted by Clownpiece

I'm going to bed probably.

See you tomorrow.

No you won't.

[DaBackpack]

Red Blaster

[Red Blaster]

[roundbox]

gutreads are funny

also I decided to post in a certain style this game
that style is "that one kid in class who uses a thesaurus to replace words to sound smart but actually makes himself look like a buffoon"

Plop, if I were grading that, I would write a gigantic frowning face for starting your conclusion with "In conclusion".

[27ninjabunnies]

I don't think I can vote Mr.P for that.

Guess Xen it is.

Once I figure out how to vote.

[roundbox]

Originally Posted by 27ninjabunnies

I don't think I can vote Mr.P for that.

Guess Xen it is.

Once I figure out how to vote.

Use the tags [twgv [/twgv to surround your voting candidate
don't forget your right square brackets ] ] ] ] ] ] ]

[27ninjabunnies]

Originally Posted by roundbox

Use the tags [twgv [/twgv to surround your voting candidate
don't forget your right square brackets ] ] ] ] ] ] ]

Like this?

XelNya

[27ninjabunnies]

Oooo. It's red. Must be wolf then. I'm so good.

[storn42]

storn

[storn42]

Originally Posted by 27ninjabunnies

Someone woke up on the wrong,side of the bed this morning. You need a hug, hun?

listen bunbuns... plop is ALWAYS on the wrong side of the bed, so i recommend him not to be the one you pick a fight with.