An essay on narrative style and speech in Woolf's 'To the Lighthouse' -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Written at :Warwick University -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- In Virginia Woolf's fiction, the breakdown or breaking open, of traditional literary forms in the light of the twentieth century querying of perception, reality and linguistic meaning, is recorded as a reconceiving of the novel-form. Throughout the course of her novels she lays down a challenge to official ways of measuring proportion, light, time and human character. Abolishing chapter and verse, Woolf creates a rhythmic, wave-like form of undulating passages as in music, where the structure of parts within an individual movement is a continuous flow rather than a series of stops and starts. She identifies language itself as a volatile and indeterminate system of mirroring suggestions; reality as potentially unknowable, and the novel form itself as inclined to substantial change to accommodate these perspectives.Virginia Woolf renounces the narrative persona as a sort of privileged extra character testifying to indisputable mental and physical events and evaluating their significance. She shifts significance to the act of mediation itself as a primary subject to be investigated "*. To the Lighthouse "*develops a system of passing the baton of interior monologue from one character to another by its eavesdropping of the self-sealed consciousness of a group enwrapped in meditation through the round of two life-encapsculating days. In "*To the Lighthouse"* the proportion of direct speech to indirect speech is minuscule, and, indeed rudimentary. If we reduce the first section of the novel to its dialogue, the following structure emerges:'Yes, of course, if it's fine to-morrow,' said Mrs Ramsay. 'But you'll have to be up with the lark'...'But,' said his father . . . 'it won't be f...
