If Woolf described part of her own and her husband's character in the novel, then she described her parents' character in the novel published in 1927.She wrote in her diary: "The work will be rather short; the whole character of the father; and the character of the mother; and St. Ives; and childhood; Everything in it—life and death, etc. But at the center is the character of the father, . . . .” The main characters in the novel, the Ramsays, are based on Virginia’s parents. The plot of the film is extremely simple: Mr. Ramsay's family and friends go to the beach house for summer vacation.Mrs. Ramsay promised her six-year-old son James that if the next day is fine, he can take a boat to visit the lighthouse standing on the rocky reef in the sea.Because of the bad weather, James' wish to go to the lighthouse was never realized that summer.After the end of the First World War, Mr. Ramsay, his children and guests revisited the old place. James finally got his wish and drove a light boat to the lighthouse with his father and sisters.But the passage of time, things have changed, and Mrs. Ramsay has long since passed away.

The novel is structured in three parts. The first "window" accounts for more than one-third of the book.The time is a September afternoon and evening; the location is Ramsay's beach house; the characters include the Ramsays, their eight children, and several guests.The window of the living room is a frame between the inside and the outside; Mrs. Ramsay, who tells stories to James inside the window, is constantly aware of her husband wandering on the terrace outside the window and Lily painting on the lawn.On this ordinary afternoon, nothing out of the ordinary happened.Lily used the picture of mother and child in the window as the background of her oil painting, but she felt dazzled and couldn't grasp the scene in front of her.Mr. Ramsay intervened when his wife was telling the story, and insisted that the next day would not be sunny and could not go to the lighthouse, which annoyed little James very much.Mrs. Ramsay comforts and encourages her husband, restores the self-confidence of Mr. Tansley, who is full of inferiority complex, promotes the marriage between Paul and Mintai, and hopes that Lily and Banks will marry.In the end, the lovely evening ended with the harmonious chatter and laughter at the dinner party she presided over.

The second part, "The Years Go by", begins with the characters getting ready for bed, and at the end of the part, some of the same characters repeat the same actions, but a full decade apart in time.These ten years are described by the author in a short and lyrical prose, which takes up less than one-tenth of the space.It seems that after a night of sleep, ten years have passed away in a trance.During this time, the First World War broke out, Mrs. Ramsay died, Prue died in childbirth, Andrew died in the war, and the poet Carmichael gained a reputation that Mr. Ramsay did not.After the war, the Ramsay family returned to the villa, and some of them were ready to complete what they hadn't done in the first part, and fulfilled their long-cherished wish.

The third "Lighthouse" is slightly shorter than the first.Mr. Ramsay resolves to go to the lighthouse, and orders James and Cam to go with him.This part describes the inner activities of the father and son during the voyage.Another narrative thread parallel to this voyage is Lily's attempt to complete the oil painting with the picture of mother and child as the background.When Mr. Ramsay jumped onto the lighthouse, Lily, who was watching them from the easel, vaguely saw them ascending to the other shore, and she got the inspiration to complete her painting with a brush.The voyage and the painting are satisfactorily concluded, and so ends the novel.

The titles of the three parts have different symbolic meanings.The title of the first part, "Window", is a frame that communicates inside and outside, which symbolizes the window of Mrs. Ramsay's soul.With her keen senses, Madam intuitively perceives people's thoughts and emotions from the inside to the outside; various characters and events are projected onto Madam's consciousness screen from the outside to the inside.The title of the second volume, "The Passage of the Years," symbolizes the temporary dominance of time, silence, and death.All the efforts of the lady seem to have become "a rainbow that will disappear in a blink of an eye".The title of the third volume, "The Lighthouse", symbolizes the inner spiritual light of Mrs. Ramsay.When the wife was alive, she often realized that "that distant and steady light is her light".Mrs. Ramsay's pilgrimage to the Lighthouse after the Lady's death, and Lily's painting, were all in her memory.This shows that although the lady is dead, she is still alive, and despite the severe test of time and death, her spiritual light has not faded out, and it is still in people's memory.Since the lighthouse symbolizes the inner spirit of the lady, the general title of the novel symbolizes the inner voyage of people overcoming time and death to obtain this inner spirit.The change in length of the three parts is "long-short-long", which coincides with the rhythm of the lighthouse light shining on the vast sea in the dark night.

In the "formology" of Western music, there is a three-part form whose structure is arranged in the form of A—B—A': The structure of the music is exactly in line with the structural form of this piece of music.The first is about Mrs. Ramsay (the first theme); the second is about the passing of time (the second theme); the third is about the memory of Mrs. and variations).This kind of structural arrangement, on the basis of contrast and symmetry, gives people a feeling of beauty. Embodies the chaotic nature of life in modern capitalist society.The heroine, Mrs. Ramsay, and the main supporting characters, Lily and Mr. Ramsay, are all acutely aware of the chaotic and disorderly atmosphere that surrounds them.They are troubled by chaos, and try to identify a clear pattern from the chaos, find out some laws, and establish some order.

Mrs. Ramsay is regarded by some literary critics as the embodiment of Eve, the Madonna or Goddess.However, she is a real, living person.She is a gentle, kind, intuitive and charming lady.She is good at housekeeping and socializing, and likes to solve problems for relatives and friends, so that they can live in harmony, and often visits the poor to help others.As Lily puts it, you need "fifty pairs of eyes" to see the Lady in every way, but not enough to see the whole thing.Mrs. Ramsay realized that "quarrels, disagreements, disagreements, prejudices of every kind are woven in every fiber of life".For these flaws in life, she always tried her best to remedy them.At the dinner table, she took pains to mobilize everyone, draw everyone into the conversation, and create an atmosphere of rapport and friendliness.She has finally created an island of spiritual beauty outside the ever-changing currents of everyday life, making the dinner party feel that they are, at least temporarily, in a sheltered and stable world.The goal pursued by Madame's social art and Lily's painting art is the same - to organize the chaotic daily life into order, so as to explore the meaning of life and discover the inner truth hidden deep under the surface.

Lily had to paint because she was driven by a "sense of reality" she felt compelled to express in color and form.She tries to use art to create an orderly, stable and solid appearance for the chaotic and ever-changing life.For her, "a paintbrush is the only reliable thing in this world full of struggle, destruction and chaos".It was the art of painting that made Lily realize: "Among the chaos, there is a certain form; this eternal passage of time (she watched the white clouds pass by in the sky, and the leaves swayed in the wind), was cast into Fixed things." Lily said, "you", "I", "she" all "disappear with the passage of time, nothing will remain, everything is constantly changing; but words and paintings No, they last forever."So it doesn't matter whether Lily's painting hangs in the hall or is thrown under the sofa; ", the goal has been achieved.

No matter how painful the complex and changing life makes Mr. Ramsay, he can find comfort in his work.That is an attempt to use reason and logic to discover law and order from chaos.Pushing the limits of human understanding, he discerned a pattern of thought in the twilight, and the chaos nearly overwhelmed him.After he solved the mystery of "Q", he advanced to the new unknown field "R".His exaggerated heroism sometimes makes people laugh; but he automatically assumes the task of exploring the truth, which is awe-inspiring. The author attempts to explore the meaning of life and the nature of self in this book.First, is it possible to gain mutual understanding and sympathy between people without sacrificing their individuality?Second, is it possible for the self to recognize and grasp the truth in the chaos, and to establish some kind of order in a chaotic era?Third, is it possible for the ego to escape the clutches of the passing of time and to survive in spite of the threat of death?

The author raises these questions through the mouths of Lily and other characters, and gradually answers these questions through the development of the plot.Mr. Ramsay and Mrs. Ramsay have very different personalities, but they complement each other and are deeply affectionate as husband and wife.Mrs. Ramsay and Mr. Tansley have very different personalities, but she can also give him sympathy and help.Not only that, but she also facilitated the harmonious relationship between Tasley and Lily, who hated each other.Lily regards the moment of friendship and understanding between her and Tansley on the seashore as a kind of good memory, which will be cherished forever in her heart "like a work of art".Mrs. Ramsay is an artist who brings harmony and harmony to the relationship between people who are full of differences, disputes and chaos.It can be seen that the author's answer to the first question is yes.

Madame seeks truth and establishes order in her small circle of relatives and friends.There are limits to her success.Her most cherished child died; the marriage she had brokered fell apart; and Lily and Banks were not married as she had wished.Mr. Ramsay seeks truth and order in the kingdom of reason, but his philosophical research is always confined to the scope of "Q", and it is difficult to go beyond the threshold.Lili's oil painting has been conceived in her heart for ten years, and finally completed, but she may not be satisfied with it, and she has no friends to appreciate it.After all, one's ability is limited, but as long as one sincerely pursues and explores within the scope of one's ability, life is still meaningful.This is the author's answer to the second question. Chaos, silence, and death seem to prevail in Book Two; Mrs Ramsay is dead, and all her efforts seem to be in vain.However, at the end, the image of Mrs. Ramsay appeared in front of Lily again. Lily finished her painting, and Mr. Ramsay arrived at the lighthouse. Shine everlastingly.In the final analysis, love has triumphed over death, and human struggle has triumphed over the passage of time.This is the author's answer to the third question.This is the theme of this novel. The first artistic feature of the novel is the subjectivity of the narrative, that is, it is narrated from the subjective point of view of the characters, and the author himself does not intervene, adopting a detached attitude of retreating behind the scenes.Woolf has used this method in "Jacob's Room" and in the novel, and she is more proficient in the use of this method in the novel.Realistic novels adopt "omniscient perspective" narration. The advantage is that the author has insight into everything and the narration is clear;So Woolf abandoned the "omniscient perspective" and switched to "inner monologue", "internal analysis" and "perceptual impression". "Inner monologue" means that the author uses the first person to let the character directly narrate his thoughts, emotions, and subjective feelings in a special situation in a way of talking to himself, and this is often a silent narration. A contemplative meditation, an inner flow of consciousness.Woolf's short stories are written with inner monologue.There is also this style of writing in the book, such as Lily's monologue in the third book.The first part of the book mainly uses the "internal analysis" writing method, which still uses the third person, but the writer does not narrate from her own standpoint, but narrates from the perspective of different characters in the book, and its content is not the writer's It is not my own thoughts, but the characters' views, feelings and thinking, which is actually an indirect inner monologue.Using this method, the angle can be constantly changed, which is very flexible, and different angles can complement each other to achieve a comprehensive effect.Therefore, Woolf especially loves to use this kind of brushwork.The second part of the book is mainly "Sensitive Impressions", which is the author uses her own language to record the pure five senses and describe the subjective impressions of the objective world. The characters are dominated by various impressions that pass through their minds from time to time.Woolf's sense is both nuanced and all-encompassing. Through her impressionistic brushstrokes that penetrate the back of the paper, we see various images, smell the fragrance of flowers, and hear the sound of the sea. The work is expressed from a subjective and introspective point of view throughout.Through the flow of consciousness, self-feeling and contemplation of the characters, Woolf subtly expresses the character of the characters, shows the experiences of the characters, and outlines the appearance of the characters.She observes the characters meticulously, and can even capture the momentary emotional fluctuations and thought transitions in the stream of consciousness, and faithfully record them, so as to vividly describe the intricate and ever-changing psychological state of each character.Therefore, E. M. Foster said: "Woolf works in the universe of atoms and seconds." Moloya believes that Woolf opened the reader's eyes, "enabling him to go below the surface events, To discover that activity of thought and feeling that is just perceived." As long as we read the first three stanzas, the characters of the Ramsays, Tansley and James emerge vividly on the page.We are not very impressed with their clothing and appearance, but we know their personality traits and psychological activities well.Mrs. Ramsay's motherly heart, Mr. Ramsay's harshness and truth-seeking, James' "Oedipus complex" and Tansley's "inferiority complex" all left a deep impression on us.Woolf not only enables us to grasp the overall character traits of the characters, but also makes us feel every subtle change in the character's psychology by describing "the rise and fall of sympathy", instant impressions, memories and fantasies, etc. vividly. I might as well give two examples here.Tansley poured cold water on little James, broke his dream of going to the lighthouse, and made him very annoying to Mrs Ramsay.He confides his heart to his wife, narrates his life experience, and wins her favor.He didn't want to go to the circus, the smell of winter made her uncomfortable again.The wife is most concerned about her husband.Mr. Ramsay needed to sacrifice others to satisfy his vanity, Tansley made the sacrifice, and she gloated a little.Woolf described how Mrs. Ramsay heard her husband and Tansley's conversation outside the window suddenly interrupted, her mood changed suddenly, and she felt that the rhythm and loudness of the waves also changed, which can be described as a stroke of magic.This is how Woolf grasps the relationship between the ever-changing emotions and the inseparable reality, interweaving the subjective, inner spiritual world and the objective, outer real world. When Tansley accompanied Mrs. Ramsay to the city, he was still full of inferiority complex when he left, but he was very proud when he returned, and the tortuous and subtle psychological changes in the process were also written in every detail.This episode seems to be writing about Tansley, but in fact it uses the changes of his subjective feelings to highlight Mrs. Ramsay's character.When Woolf writes about the psychological activities of the characters, it is like peeling off the cocoon, digging deeper and deeper layer by layer. From the subjectivity of the narrative, three other artistic features of this novel are derived—symbolism, lyricism, and the intersection and contrast between subjective time and objective time. Stream-of-consciousness novelists use subjective narrative methods to explore inner mysteries and unearth inner truths, and they inevitably resort to symbols.Because subtle psychological activities are inherently unpredictable, can only be understood, and difficult to express in words.So, says Bergson: "When we study purely emotional states of mind...we know 'a priori' that we can hardly count them except by some symbolic representation." The late Symbolist poet T. S. Eliot proposed to express thoughts and emotions through symbolic hints of "objective counterparts".Influenced by him, Woolf applied this method to her stream-of-consciousness novels, achieving the effect of symbolic suggestion through various metaphors, images, associations, and even structures.The whole structure of the novel and the titles of its parts are symbolic.I have analyzed this point earlier. In the second part, the author often uses symbolic hints to express subjective sensory impressions.For example, she described the sea breeze as a ghost "probing into the brain", and described the actions of the limping housekeeper as "tossing and rolling in the sea like a boat", "looking like a tropical fish reflecting the golden snake's lap." Shuttle swimming in clear water."This way of writing, like symbolic poetry, has an extremely strong subjective color.Its artistic effect reminds us of the "freehand brushwork" painting in Chinese painting that "only seeks similarity in spirit, not appearance". Sometimes, symbolism can also produce a feeling of ambiguity and confusion.For example, when Woolf describes the silent empty house in the second book, there is a sentence in it: "The fly forms a net in a room full of sunlight." Readers may wonder: How can flies form a net?Here we need to use our imagination.Maybe the empty house has been deserted for a long time, and the flies are flying in the sun, densely like a spider web; maybe the empty house is not cleaned, and there are many dead flies stuck to the spider web in the corner.If the traditional objective narrative technique is used to write "a group of flies are flying in a sunny room" or "the cobwebs in the corner are full of dead flies", it will weaken the subjective color and leave us no room for imagination. It's tasteless when you get up.Therefore, the symbolist poet Malame said: "To clearly point out the object is tantamount to weakening the satisfaction that poetry gives us by three-quarters." It is particularly noteworthy that Woolf borrows not only symbolism from poetry, but also "dominant motives" from music, using recurring "dominant images" to symbolize characters' personalities.In Jacob's Chamber, Woolf begins to use this method.In , she further uses this method to show the character of the Ramsay couple, which is actually the character of her parents. Mrs. Ramsay . . . immediately burst forth in a shower of energy, a spray of water; . . . she was alive and full of life, as if all the energies contained in her were being melted into power, burning and glowing ....The lifeless male plunged into this luscious and fertile spring of life and mist, sucking desperately like the cheeky beak of a poor and empty bird. Mrs. Ramsay was born with a bodhisattva heart. She cared very much for everyone around her, especially for her husband. She often gave him comfort and caress to calm down his irritable mood.Woolf compares this kind of motherly heart to the rain and dew that nourish all things.Mr. Ramsay is a self-centered figure. His academically too ambitious ambitions are difficult to achieve, and his spirit is frustrated. He will go to his wife for shelter and comfort.So Woolf compares him to a bird's beak desperately sucking on the rain.These two "dominant images" appear repeatedly in the novel and become symbols of the personalities of these two characters.She also used another image to symbolize the intimate relationship between the two of them: "It's like playing two notes, one high and one low, at the same time, and let them resonate harmoniously. The effect of complementing each other." Virginia's sister Wen Nisha believes that the portrayal of her parents' characters in the book is very successful. Mortimer, a young writer at Bloomsbury, said: "Nobody has ever written prose as good as Virginia Woolf's. People envy the beauty of the world she sees - what she 'sees' It's full of emeralds and corals, as if the whole world is made of precious stones'." Influenced by Roger Frye, her narrative scenery is not a naturalistic description or "photographic" representation of the external world, but It is to express the world observed in the eyes of the self with a strong personality like the post-impressionist paintings, and to pursue unique artistic conceptions and artistic effects.This makes her beautiful and lyrical words have a distinctive poetic and picturesque flavor. Even seeing a plate of ordinary fruits on the table, she will think of the banquet of Poseidon and the grapes of Bacchus.She carefully considers the choice of words and sentences, not only paying attention to the symmetry of the structure, but even the symmetry and harmony of the syllables, which produces a musical and poetic effect. Western critics generally believe that No. 2 is a model of Woolf's unique lyrical style.Do S Fur wrote: Her delicate brushstrokes of impressionism and her astonishingly refined descriptions have reached the point of perfection in this passionate novel.The sea and the night are one, and time flows around a center.The crystalline sea, with its sound and waves, gives rhythm to everyday life, to rocky structures, to a world of puddles, quicksand and sea breeze.An atmosphere of friendliness, subtlety and sensitivity is created.It expresses eternal interest. At the same time, we should also notice that Woolf's heart-to-heart style is in harmony with her stream-of-consciousness technique.The dialogues in the works are sometimes without quotation marks, as if the characters are silently thinking.Sometimes the dialogue is interrupted suddenly, the tone changes suddenly, and the text turns suddenly, revealing the twists and turns or changes in the thinking or emotions of the characters.When we read Woolf's texts, it is as if the author is whispering to us and talking with us. Unknowingly, he leads us into the inner world of the characters, follows their thoughts and shares them. The joys, sorrows, sorrows, and joys, and experience the special effects caused by the stream-of-consciousness technique.It can be seen that Woolf's beautiful and lyrical style and stream-of-consciousness skills are perfectly matched and integrated. Bergson called the concept of time recognized by people's common sense as "space time", and regarded it as a quantitative concept that extends sequentially at each moment and expresses width.He believes that "psychological time" is "pure time" and "real time". It is a quality concept that permeates each other and expresses intensity at every moment.He argues that the deeper we go into consciousness, the less the concept of "space-time" applies.Bergson's "mental time" theory has had a great influence on stream-of-consciousness novelists, who "can open and close time like a fan when writing a book", or extend a few minutes to Several pages, or compress a longer period of time, or interweave, interweave, and gather various scenes of the present, past, and future that are seen, recalled, and imagined, and presented to readers in an interlaced manner. , for a special dramatic effect.Woolf used this approach to time in her novel.Some scholars believe that she may not have read Bergson's philosophical works, and perhaps she was indirectly influenced by Bergson through reading Proust's stream-of-consciousness novels. In this novel, Woolf's special treatment of time is even more striking than in the previous novel.The first part of this book, from the perspective of objective time, only has one afternoon and dusk, but from the perspective of "psychological time", because it records the flow of consciousness of the characters, many memories and imaginations are interspersed, and the present, past and future are intertwined , and thus appear very long.The second part is ten years old in terms of objective time, but because the empty house is unoccupied, from the perspective of "psychological time", it is just a short moment.At the end of the first part, Mrs. recalled her friendship with the Manning family twenty years ago at the dinner table. The scene of this past was preserved in her memory like a static and beautiful "dream world". , "It's like re-reading a good book".In this instance, Mrs. Ramsay's mind wanders to a bygone age that is clearly contained within the framework of objective time.Sometimes, however, Woolf describes a character's recollections or imaginations without marking the shift in time from the present objective moment in the traditional way.For example, in the first part, the part where Tasley accompanies Mrs. Ramsay to the city seems to be directly narrated according to the external objective time.actually not.Tansley insisted that the next day the weather would be too bad to go to the lighthouse.Mrs. Ramsay thought he hated him: "Really, he's said enough... She looked at him. He's such an ugly monster, the children said..." From the children's comments, Mrs. thought of his exacting words and rigidity in fact.Then Madame noticed that the children had slipped away like fawns after lunch.It reminded her of the day when Tansley had followed her into the dining room after the children had left, and she, sensing his bewilderment, had asked him to accompany her into town.The next few pages describe in detail the inner feelings of these two characters on the way to the city. However, the author does not specify that this episode is a memory picture that appears on the consciousness screen, rather than the fact that happened in front of the eyes.However, after the reader has gone through the entire episode along the thread of Tansley's consciousness flow, Tansley's comment on the weather standing in front of the window interrupted Mrs. Ramsay's train of thought in time and brought her back to the current Come in reality.In the second subsection the author writes: Tansley stood at the window and said, "I can't go to the lighthouse tomorrow." Poor boy, Mrs. Ramsay thought, why do you keep saying that? Although there is no punctuation or additional explanation used in traditional novels to point out the previous use of "psychological time", careful readers can rely on Mrs. Ramsay's association and the framework of objective time in the second subsection without much difficulty, Judging that the above episode is obviously a subjective memory. However, in Woolf's works, the difference between objective time and subjective time is extremely significant: various external events only occupy a very small space in the whole novel, while the reflection of these external events on the screen of subjective consciousness, But it is full of imagination and played to the fullest.The main "truth" shown throughout the book is the inner reality tinged with distinct subjective colors.In the third part of the novel, James finally came to the foot of the lighthouse, and what he saw was the naked and straight tower with small windows on it and clothes drying around it, although he still had another picture in his mind for many years. Image of the lighthouse: "A silvery, smoky tower with a large yellow eye." He felt that both drawings were accurate and that both images were "real." "Because there is nothing in the world that is just a simple thing." The author's intention is very clear: everything has its objective and subjective forms, the former is material and physical, and the latter is spiritual , spiritual.The benevolent see benevolence, the wise see wisdom.And Woolf himself is obviously a spiritualist who focuses on spiritual aspects. If we compare Woolf's three stream-of-consciousness novels, we will find that although "Jacob's Room" is full of poetry, there are too many details, and the protagonist Jacob is a bit illusory; Overcoming the shortcomings of ethereal, but it seems too stereotyped; only by maintaining a delicate balance between the realm of poetry and real life, it has reached a higher artistic level.In this novel, objective time and psychological time, subjective reality and objective reality, direct description and symbolic allusion are intricately intertwined.Thus it is necessary to have fifty pairs of eyes to see a person, and to see a lighthouse from different angles; and it is possible to have quite different ideas and feelings about apparently simple events.Characters with multiple personalities, meditating on various issues beyond the constraints of time and space; lyrical language with poetic and picturesque flavor; structural forms rich in symbolic meaning-all these factors make Woolf one of the most important novels in stream of consciousness novels. do.The critic Blackstone said: "Reading any ordinary novel after The Lighthouse will make you feel as if you have left the light of day and plunged into a world of puppets and cardboard." This book is very rich in connotation, ... full of thoughts, full of feelings ... it is a living whole." I think this is a very appropriate evaluation.