Time Theme Analysis

To the Lighthouse explores time at every scale, tracking the intricate thoughts and impressions within a single lived second while also meditating on the infinity of geologic time stretching back into the past and forward into the future beyond the span of human knowledge. Between these two extremes, the novel presents the different measures of time out of which individual experience is composed. Part 1, The Window, and Part 3, The Lighthouse, occur almost in “real time,” as the action described takes place within a period more or less equivalent to the period of time it takes to read the section. Within these sections, each character’s perspective picks up on an immense range of detail and the observant Mrs. Ramsay and Lily are especially conscious of the unique specificity of each moment. The novel also explores the vacation time of the Ramsays and their guests, for whom the scenes of the novel are lived within a “break” from their normal lives in London, and the circular, ritual time of communal activity and habit, as the characters repeat the daily routines of walks and dinners, react to one another in predictable ways, and repeatedly profess long-held opinions. Zooming out from daily life, To the Lighthouse reflects on time’s larger frameworks as Mrs. Ramsay considers the irretrievable time of childhood and she, along with Mr. Ramsay and Lily, confront human tininess in the course of the Earth’s existence. Yet Mrs. Ramsay and Lily (and, though he has his doubts, Mr. Ramsay) believe that it is possible to make “something permanent” out of the moment, and thus Lily paints to partake of eternity as Mrs. Ramsay orchestrates lived experience until it becomes as transcendent as art. In Part 2, Time Passing, the “real time” of The Window accelerates to breakneck speed and the section spans a whole decade in just a few pages. Without much attention to detail, this view on time lacks the particularity and complexity of time in The Window and is characterized only by a barebones framework of events. Thus, the enormity of Mrs. Ramsay’s, Prue’s, and Andrew’s deaths, and of World War I, are reduced to one sentence parentheticals.

As committed as it is to capturing an experience of lived time, To the Lighthouse is just as interested in the relics that linger after experience, and the novel holds up many different forms of memory. There is the history book memory of impartially and sparely recounted event as demonstrated in the bullet-like plot points of Part 2, Time Passing. There is the circular memory Mrs. Ramsay has thinking back on her youth, recognizing in her children’s youth their own future memories, and feeling life to be a cycle of marriage and childbearing passed on from generation to generation. There is the living memory of Mrs. McNab and Lily as their recollected images of Mrs. Ramsay appear visible on the surface of the present world.

To the Lighthouse ultimately demonstrates the inadequacy of clock time to measure human experience: life is not felt, Woolf shows, second by orderly second. Instead, one minute seems to drag on an eternity while the next two decades speed by. One is one second aware of a human lifespan as a long, luxurious stretch and the next second perceives it to be an infinitesimal fraction of Earth’s much more enduring existence. Memories return in the present and live on, sometimes seeming never to have passed.