The Nature of Interior Life Theme Analysis

Written as a stream of consciousness, To the Lighthouse constantly investigates the contours and patterns of human thought through its form and style. While writing within the perspective of a single character, Woolf’s sentences leap back and forth between various impressions, memories, and emotions, formally illustrating the associative nature of an individual mind. Lofty thoughts stand on par with everyday ones. Mrs. Ramsay’s mind alone leaps between thoughts on the nature of compassion, the relationship between men and women, household budgeting, her children’s futures, the state of her society, and the state of the beef dish she’ll be serving at dinner. Emotions, too, flash quickly in and out so that Mrs. Ramsay’s indignation at Mr. Ramsay’s exclamation “damn you” is restored to admiration just a few seconds later when he offers to double-check on the weather he has so adamantly insisted will be poor. While capable of such quicksilver change, the mind is also capable of extended preservation, so that Mr. Tansley’s insult floats in Lily’s mind ten years later even after she’s forgotten who said it.

Over the course of the novel, Woolf is also constantly leaping back and forth between the minds of different characters. Though everyone’s mind shares an associative, eclectic tendency, individual minds are also distinguishable enough from one another that Woolf sometimes doesn’t even have to indicate that she’s leapt from one person’s perspective to another’s, as when the text jumps from Lily’s to Mrs. Ramsey’s mind at the end of dinner in The Window. Likewise, Mr. Ramsay’s stream of consciousness is immediately distinguishable from Mrs. Ramsay’s in its lack of particular, material detail (the flowers, stars, and other such quotidian beauties that Mrs. Ramsay laments his inability to notice). As it slides in and out of different characters’ minds, the novel’s figuration further suggests that the divide between internal and external life might not be so rigid after all. Repeating metaphors of the mind as a pool of water and as a beehive transform abstract, private thought into a concrete, shared element of the natural world.

Every aspect of the novel speaks to the diversity of interior life: the diversity of disparate thoughts within an individual stream of consciousness as well as the diversity of different thoughts and thought patterns that characterize different individuals’ streams of consciousness. Lily’s reflection towards novel’s end that in order to see Mrs. Ramsey clearly a person would need “fifty pairs of eyes” (since each of those pairs would have such different insights into her character) can be read as a description of the novel itself: written through many separate pairs of eyes to achieve the most complete possible vision.