《到灯塔去》的叙事方式研究

《到灯塔去》的叙事方式研究
一、综述国内外对本课题的研究动态，说明选题的依据和意义：《到灯塔去》为英国著名女作家弗吉尼亚•伍尔夫的意识流杰作，在《到灯塔去》中意识流的叙事方式运用得尤为精彩。

伍尔夫认为现实生活事实上是由普通人在一个瞬间接受的数不清的印象构成，她的小说以表现人物的心理活动为主。

《到灯塔去》靠一个个人物的内心独白来展现、以自由联想组织故事，把意识流叙事手法运用到极致。

而在时间上有意打破传统时间观念和传统心理小说的顺时序，消除逻辑时间界限，将感觉中的过去、现在和将来拧在一起组成主观心理时间，随人物心理时间的变化结构作品。

梅•弗里德曼认为内心独白可再现意识的任一邻域。

法国哲学家亨利•柏格森认为心理时间是各个时刻相互渗透的质的概念。

瞿世镜认为意识流小说着力描写人物心理的种种感受，开掘深层的意识来展露隐蔽的灵魂和内心世界。

目前国内外对伍尔夫作品的研究多在其主题上,而对《到灯塔去》的研究大致是女性主义和小说的结构,人物的心理描写及书中的艺术。

在创作上,韩世轶对小说叙事角度与话语模式作了探讨;程倩讨论了美学机制；李森分析了其中的意识流写作技巧。

本文将从叙事方式的角度分析此小说的的写作特征,依靠前人的研究方法和研究成果，试图在这方面做一些尝试性研究，从不同角度分析其特殊的叙事方式，旨在理清意识流独特的叙事方式在《到灯塔去》中的应用。

二、研究的基本内容，拟解决的主要问题：
伍尔夫的小说《到灯塔去》是一本意识流小说的杰作,书中没有完整的故事情节,仅仅靠叙事者改变和自由联想来组织故事,小说的主体是一个个人物自己的内心独白,而时间上将感觉中的过去、现在和将来拧在一起交错对照组成主观心理时间。

本文将从自由联想组织故事（通过人物的意识流动把一些特定的思想情感及印象按一定顺序安排）、间接内心独白（通过书中人物的视角来叙述，从不同角度揭示人物心理变化并自由地出入人物精神世界）以及客观时间和心理时间交错这三个方面探讨书中的独特叙事方式,分析伍尔夫小说的叙事特点及意识流小说的叙事手法在书中的应用，希望能使人们更加理解意识流小说杰作《到灯塔去》及其独特叙事方式，并能借鉴、应用。

One of the most prominent literary figures of the twentieth century, Virginia Woolf is widely admired for her innovation of stream-of-consciousness narrative methods in the novel. To the Lighthouse is usually considered as her best work in which her narrative methods were remarkable and her writing skill become perfect. It narrates story by different narrators and free association. Through the characters’interior monologue, it tweaks the past, now and future in consciousness to form the subjective time and compare it with the external time. With the
wide use of these skills, Virginia Woolf depicts her characters’“inner world”to readers, hence she fully reveals the content and process of human consciousness to the reader.
作为二十世纪最卓越的文学家之一，弗吉尼亚•伍尔夫因她小说中创新的意识流叙事方式而受到广泛的推崇。

《到灯塔去》通常被认为是她的最佳作品，在此小说中她独特的叙事方式引人注目，写作方法趋于完美。

它靠叙事者改变和自由联想来叙述故事，通过间接内心独白把意识中的过去、现在和未来拧在一起形成主观时间并和客观时间对照。

借助于这些叙事方式的运用，伍尔夫向读者展示了人物的内心世界并充分地揭示了人们意识活动的内容和过程。

Contents
Introduction (1)
1. Narrating the Story (1)
1.1 Different Narrators (2)
1.2 Free Association (4)
2. Streams of Consciousness (6)
2.1 Indirect Interior Monologue (6)
2.2 Characters’Inner World (9)
3. Time Method (11)
3.1 Clock Time vs. Psychological Time (12)
3.2 Arrangement of the Narration (13)
Conclusion (15)
Introduction
Virginia Woolf is an experimental novelist, critic, short story writer and essayist of the twentieth century. First published in 1927, To the Lighthouse received wide critical acclaim and is one of Virginia Woolf’s most accessible novels, it is a notable stream-of-consciousness work.
Over these years, various comments and reviews have been applied to this novel, they have placed Woolf within a
psychoanalytic framework, feminism and postmodernism, and they also studied her narrative methods. Woolf believes that novelists try to capture the evanescent moments of being and not conform to the conventional fiction plot or characterization. According to Leaska, “Almost half the first section is transmitted through Mrs. Ramsay; more than three-quarters of the second section is given omnisciently; and more than half of the third section is filtered through Lily Briscoe.”(147) Li Sen analyses the technique of stream of consciousness in To the Lighthouse. He believes her “inner subjective realistic theory”express the real life profoundly (李森23). Qing Hong states in her thesis, “The moment of being epiphany in To the Lighthouse”, she thinks the epiphany is put on the joint of the interweaving of clock time and external time (秦红37).
This thesis aims to explore Virginia Woolf’s particular narrative methods in To the Lighthouse: narrating the story by different narrators and free association; using indirect interior monologue to show characters’inner movement; external time and psychological time interweaving. By using these methods, Woolf successfully shows characters’inner world to readers.
1 Narrating the Story
The novel uses different narrators and free association to narrate the story. According to the encyclopedia, stream of consciousness, in literature, relates the technique that records the various thoughts and feelings of a character without regard to logical argument or narrative order. To the Lighthouse is a typical stream-of-consciousness novel in which the traditional structure of plot have almost disappeared and only to be a little attachment to reveal people’s subjective felling. To the Lighthouse is composed of the continuous impressions and consciousness of the characters’. In this novel, the writer as an omniscient narrator has almost completely vanished and almost everything stated appears by the reflection in the consciousness of the characters. And the novel does not progress on
“what-happens-next”basis, but rather moves forward through a series of scenes arranged according to an order of association.
1.1 Different Narrators
The question of who shall narrate the story or through whose eyes reader shall see is one which every writer of the novel has had to face. The novelist can either describe the characters from outside, as an impartial or partial on-looker; or he can assume
omniscience and describe them from within; or he can place himself in the position of one of them and affect to be in the dark as to the motives of the rest; or there are certain intermediate attitudes.
By choosing narrative perspective, the narrator is always restricting himself to a single character’s perspective. Such narration will be limited by that character’s intelligence and by his moral and social values. The narrator-agent for this type of narration could be either the first person ‘I’or the third-person (‘he’, ‘she’, ‘it’, ‘they’...). (Booth 62)
To the Lighthouse uses different narrators and narrates the story from characters’eyes. In To the Lighthouse, a paragraph may be shared simultaneously by two or more of the narrators; or the material may be presented in such a way as to make it impossible to distinguish between the omniscient narrator and the perceiving consciousness of a character. So in To the Lighthouse, the reader must have sufficient insight into the author’s language to make distinctions in the tones of the
various narrators and in the signals provided for identifying the principal narrators.
The problem of determining the changing of narrator in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse is apparent in the first sentences of the novel that demonstrate the subtlety with which Mrs. Woolf manipulates her points of view while simultaneously modulating their tone.
(1) “Yes, of course，if it’s fine tomorrow,”said Mrs. Ramsay.
(2) “But you’ll have to be up with the lark,”she added. (3)To her conveyed an extraordinary joy, as if it were settled, the son…the wonder to which he had looked forward, for years and years it seemed…(4) Since he belonged, even at the age of six…James Ramsay…endowed the picture of a refrigerator, as his mother spoke, with heavenly bliss. (5) It was fringed with joy. (6)The wheelbarrow…so that his mother, watching him guide his scissors neatly round the refrigerator, imagined him all red…(Lighthouse: 9-10)
The first two sentences are, of course, spoken by Mrs. Ramsay. In the third sentence however, “To her son these words conveyed an extraordinary joy…”readers move into the young boy’s mind; without any discernible change in syntax or vocabulary, readers are shifted into the mind, and are being given a brief inside view, of the boy who has so looked forward to this expedition “for years and years it seemed”, for who other than for this young boy would it have seemed like “years and years”? The fourth (and the short fifth) sentence belongs clearly to the omniscient narrator, command with which the sudden expansiveness of the ideas, the auctorial they are presented, and the shift to the present tense all indicate the presence of the all-seeing,
all-knowing, objective angle of perspective. The sixth sentence begins again with James’s feelings: “all these were so colored and distinguished in his mind that he had already…”, and shifts for the first time into Mrs. Ramsay’s thoughts with “though he appeared...”Readers see James, now, through Mrs. Ramsay’s eyes and share her feelings for her son as she watches him cutting out pictures from an illustrated catalogue. The example here demonstrates several of the ways in which to determine who is narrating. However, it also suggests the angle from which, as well as the manner in which, the material is being given. This
kind of awareness is extremely important in Mrs. Woolf’s novel because the lines separating narrator and author, and narrator and character, are, in most cases, very obscure. In some instances therefore, it is vital to see, to feel, the various ways the author places the different narrators.
1.2 Free Association
The chief technique in controlling the movement of stream-of -consciousness in fiction has been an application of the principles of psychological free association. Among all the narrative methods in To the Lighthouse, the most confusing to follow may be the free association, for the consciousness of the characters in the fiction has no order and no regular pattern. However, the application of the free association in the
stream-of-consciousness novel has much significance for the narration.
Every responsible writer must face the problem of determining the possible technical devices by which consciousness can be represented convincingly and determining the controls by which selection of material can be made. What, then, are the essential problems of depicting consciousness in fiction? There are two orders of them and both come from the nature of consciousness
of itself. “First, a particular consciousness, we assume, is a private thing; and second, consciousness is never static but is always in a state of motion.”(Woolf, Collected Essays 320) The first of these is dependent on the second, so we shall occupy ourselves now with the problem of the flux of consciousness. Complex theory need not concern us in order to determine the nature of the movement of consciousness, since it is enough to set up difficult problems for any reader. The notion of synthesis must be added to that of flux to indicate the quality of being sustained, of being able to absorb interferences after the flow is momentarily broken, and of being to pass freely from one level of consciousness to another. “Three factors control the association: first, the memory, which is its basis; second, the senses, which guide it; and third, the imagination, which determines its elasticity.”(Humphrey 30) These three factors are dependent and influencing each other, composing the main features of consciousness.
The continuity of the section is established through an exterior occurrence involving Mrs. Ramsay and James: Mrs. Ramsay tells James the story of the Fisherman. After comforting her
despair-stricken husband, Mrs. Ramsay began to read the story to James. Many lines later, she went on with the story,“The man’
s heart grew heavy, she read aloud, and he would not go…”. Then she entrusted her daughter to ask Mildred if Andrew, Miss Doyle, And Mr. Rayley had come back. A little later she read, “Next morning the wife awoke first...”A few lines later, she read on, “Ah, wife”. Four pages later, she said, “And that's the end,”at that time, the stroke of the lighthouse came into her eyes. Then Mildred came in to fetch them.
Another remarkable example perches in the last part of To the Lighthouse. In this part, Lily Briscoe, the artist, while watching the sea, feels her mind ebb and flow with it. When she paints the picture by the seaside, her mind exhibits a plenty of vivid pictures and sights: She seems to see Mrs. Ramsay and later she sees somebody in the drawing room set an odd-shaped triangular shadow over the step. From the triangular shadow over the step to the shadow on her canvas and to the meadow under the canvas and finally to the faraway in the sea, all the fragments of life are put together and reflected. We may trace her free association as follows: When looks at the sea she thought about Mr. Ramsay and his children. She laughed, hearing Mr. Carmichael suddenly grunted, and looking at the house. She thought of her picture, sitting down and examining with her brush, seeing Mr. Carmichael. Then she thought of Mr.
Carmichael and his poems, the squeak of a hinge drawing her attention. After that she thought of Charles Tansley, raising a little mountain for the ants to clime over. Then she thought of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay, she screwing up her eyes and standing back. At last she thought of Mrs. Ramsay and saw an
odd-shaped triangular shadow over the step, dipping her brush.
The information Woolf offers here makes readers feel that the traditional narration is too inferior to bear comparison. Wherever Lily’s eyes cast a look, there sprung some bygone memories concerning what she sees. Her consciousness just flows freely and naturally among present, past and future, or from one thing or person to another. Therefore, readers experience great enjoyment with such free conscious activities.
2 Streams of Consciousness
By using indirect interior monologue, To the Lighthouse successfully narrates characters’consciousness and brings readers to the characters’inner world unconsciously. So readers can see their inner movement directly and know their characters.
2.1 Indirect Interior Monologue
Interior monologue is a term that is most often confused with stream-of-consciousness. It is used more accurately than the latter, since it is a rhetorical term and properly refers to a literary technique. Indirect interior monologue is a type of interior monologue in which an omniscient author presents unspoken material as if it was directly from the consciousness of a character and, with commentary and description, guides the reader through it. It differs from direct interior monologue basically in that the author intervenes between the character’s psyche and the reader. The author is an on-the-screen guide for the reader. It retains the fundamental quality of interior monologue in that what it presents of consciousness is direct; that is in the idiom and with the peculiarities of the character’s psychic processes.
Virginia Woolf, among the stream-of-consciousness writers, relies most on the indirect interior monologue and she uses it with great skill. In To the Lighthouse she succeeds in producing a much subtle effect through the use of this method. This novel contains a great deal of straight, conventional narration and description, but the indirect interior monologue is used often to give the novel its special character of seeming to be always within the consciousness of the chief characters. Virginia Woolf
says in her essay, Modern Fiction: “Let us record the atom as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearances, which each sight incident scores upon the consciousness.”(Collected Essays 13) This is the best description in her method. Let us examine the following passage in the first part.
Steife, divisions, difference of opinion, prejudices twisted into the very fibre of being, oh, that they should begin so early, Mrs. Ramsay deplored. They were so critical, her children. They talked such nonsense. She went from the dining room, holding James by the hand, since he would not go with the others... (Lighthouse 17)
The paragraph above is represented in the manner of straight narration by the author, they are clearly what the character feels, and they reflect the character’s consciousness and inner thought. The passage, although short, includes presentation of Mrs. Ramsay’s consciousness, the author’s guide by the phrase “Mrs. Ramsay deplored”and the author’s description “she went from the dinning-room, holding James by the hand.”
Without the use of the indirect interior monologue it would be a difficult task for the writer to express the character’s inner world in such great coherence and surface unity. The author’s wide use of sentences like “she thought”, “she felt”and “she supposed”, also makes the author’s intervention possible and natural. In the last section of the novel, on the journey to the lighthouse, there is one of Cam’s interior monologues, in which such device is applied.
It was very small; shaped something like a leaf stood on. So we took a little boat …From her hand, ice cold, held deep in the sea, there spurt up a fountain of joy at the change, at the escape, at the adventure ... it had a place in the universe ... The old gentleman in the study could have told her.( Lighthouse 276)
From the above quotation, we can see that with the constant use of the sentences phrases underlined, Virginia Woolf makes her monologue more natural and acceptable by her readers. The presentation of the character’s interior monologue is not only coherent in meaning but also conventional in appearance. It is
something of a shock to realize that what is usually considered the most extreme form of the experimental novel is often worked out with the basic method of using conventional description by an omniscient author without any attempt by the author to disguise the fact. The only thing unusual about it is the subject of this description; of course, in the
stream-of-consciousness novel is the consciousness or psychic life of the characters.
Woolf uses some skill in dealing with indirect interior monologue, as semicolons which will show in the following part:
Yes, he did say disagreeable things, Mrs. Ramsay admitted; it was odious of him to rub this in, and make James still more disappointed; but at the same time, she would not let them laugh at him. ‘The atheist’, they called him; ‘the little atheist’. Rose mocked him; Prue mocked him; Andrew, Jasper, Roger mocked him; even old Badger without a tooth in his head had bit him…(Lighthouse 10)
The above paragraph illustrates the occasionally baffling similarity between a narrator’s utterance and
omniscient-narrator commentary. The extraordinary subtlety of Woolf’skill here is located in the use of the semicolons after “they called him”. Had she not placed a semicolon there, the reader might easily be misled to think that the sentence “but at the same time, she would not let them laugh at him”is an omniscient-narrator commentary. So in this paragraph, with the help of semicolons, the reader can easily discern the character’s interior monologue and when it begins and stops.
In the case of indirect interior monologue, Virginia Woolf uses frequent parentheses to guide the reader in reading the character’s mind. Parentheses can be signals of digression and of simultaneity as this one: “Teaching human power, Lily suspected. (She and preaching was putting is beyond away things.)”(Lighthouse 63) Parentheses can also be little asides, explanations, pointers to what is going on. Lily in this passage is thinking about Mr. Bankes: I respect you (she addressed him silent in every atom); you are not vain; you are entirely impersonal; you are finer than Mr. Ramsay; you neither are the nest human being that I know; you have nor child (without any sexual feeling, she longed to cherish loneliness), you live for
science (involuntarily, sections of potatoes rose before her eyes); praise would be an insult to you; generous, pure-hearted, heroic man! (Lighthouse 34)
Here the parentheses signal sudden and momentary switches in perspective. The narrative is thrown backwards and forwards between Lily’s voices, with its intonation mimicked exactly. Lily’s dwelling on the austerity of Bankes’life indicates not only Bankes’desire for solitude, but also hers--and at the same time shows her resistance to her own loneliness. She wants at once to extend and to limit, to see more of Bankes and less of herself. This conflict is represented in the simultaneous development of two registers: the succession of main clauses inscribing Lily’s voice, and the little interruptions of the parentheses, at the corner of Lily’s eye. The final set of brackets describes a sudden obstruction of her vision: the rising of potatoes before her eyes. Yet this obstruction too is part of the movement of her thought: “It is her habit to conceptualize intellectual disciplines as material objects (‘She always saw, when she thought of Mr. Ramsay’s work, a scrubbed kitchen table.’)”(Lighthouse 331). Here again the parentheses act as signals of perspective.
With the help of semicolons and parentheses embroidered to her indirect interior monologue, Virginia Wolf successfully overcomes the shortcomings of stream-of-consciousness novel of being incoherent and chaotic, and achieves great explicitness, coherence, vividness and surface unity in presenting the characters’inner world.
2.2 Characters’Inner World
Another thing that should be mentioned is that the characteristics of the characters’consciousness have close relation to the characters’personal character. In To the Lighthouse, most of the consciousness depiction is that of Mrs. Ramsay, Mr. Ramsay and Lily Briscoe .
Mrs. Ramsay stands as the centre of the development of the novel: other characters rotate around her and grow during the rotation. She has a wide vision, a rich imagination and a deep sympathy. Mrs. Ramsay emerges from the novel’s opening pages not only as a woman of great kindness and tolerance but also as a protector. Indeed, her primary goal is to preserve her youngest son James’s sense of hope and wonder surrounding the lighthouse. Though she realizes (as James himself does) that Mr. Ramsay is correct in declaring that foul weather will ruin the
next day’s voyage, she persists in assuring James that the trip is a possibility. She does so not to raise expectations that will inevitably be dashed, but rather because she realizes that the beauties and pleasures of this world are very short and should be preserved, protected, and cultivated as much as possible. So deep is this commitment that she behaves similarly to each of her guests, even those who do not deserve or appreciate her kindness. Before heading into town, for example, she insists on asking Augustus Carmichael, whom she senses does not like her, if she can bring him anything to make his stay more comfortable. As Lily Briscoe notes in the novel’s final section, Mrs. Ramsay feels the need to play this role primarily in the company of men. Indeed, Mrs. Ramsay feels obliged to protect the entire opposite sex. According to her, men shoulder the burden of ruling countries and managing economies. Their important work, she believes, leaves them vulnerable and in need of constant reassurance, a service that women can and should provide. At the same time, interjections of domesticated anxiety, such as her refrain of “the bill for the greenhouse would be fifty pounds”undercut this power. Ultimately, as is evident from her meeting with Mr. Ramsay at the close of “The Window”Mrs. Ramsay never compromises herself. Here, she is able--masterfully--to
satisfy her husband’s desire for her to tell him she loves him without saying the words she finds so difficult to say. This scene displays Mrs. Ramsay’s ability to bring together disparate things into a whole.
Mr. Ramsay is a prominent metaphysical philosopher. He loves his family but often acts like something of a tyrant. He tends to be selfish and harsh due to his persistent personal and professional anxieties. He fears, more than anything, that his work is insignificant in the grand scheme of things and that he will not be remembered by future generations. Mr. Ramsay stands, in many respects, as Mrs. Ramsay’s opposite. Whereas she acts patiently, kindly, and diplomatically toward others, he tends to be short-tempered, selfish, and rude. Woolf fittingly describes him as “lean as a knife, narrow as the blade of one”which conjures both his physical presence and suggests the sharpness (and violence) of his personality. Throughout the novel, Mr. Ramsay implores his wife and even his guests for sympathy. Mr. Ramsay is uncertain about the fate of his work and its legacy, and his insecurity manifests itself either as a weapon or a weakness. His keen awareness of death’s inevitability motivates him to dash the hopes of young James and to bully Mrs. Ramsay into declaring her love for him. This
realization also forces him to confront his own mortality and face the possibility that he, like the forgotten books and plates that litter the second part of the novel, might sink into oblivion.
Like Mr. Ramsay, Lily is plagued by fears that her work lacks worth. She begins a portrait of Mrs. Ramsay at the beginning of the novel but has trouble finishing it. The opinions of men like Charles Tansley, who insists that women cannot paint or write, threaten to undermine her confidence. Lily is a passionate artist, fearing that her paintings will be hung in attics or tossed absentmindedly under a couch. Conventional femininity, represented by Mrs. Ramsay in the form of marriage and family, confounds Lily, and she rejects it. The recurring memory of Charles Tansley insisting that women can neither paint nor write deepens her anxiety. It is with these self-doubts that she begins her portrait of Mrs. Ramsay at the beginning of the novel, a portrait riddled with problems that she is unable to solve. But Lily undergoes a drastic transformation over the course of the novel, evolving from a woman who cannot make sense of the shapes and colors that she tries to reproduce into an artist who achieves her vision and, more important, overcomes the anxieties that have kept her from it. By the end of the novel, Lily, a serious and diligent worker, puts into practice all what she has
learned from Mrs. Ramsay. Her artistic achievement suggests a larger sense of completeness in that she finally feels united with Mr. Ramsay and the rational, intellectual sphere that he represents.
3 Time Method
For Virginia Woolf, time is not measured by the clock, but mainly experienced emotionally. Time for the characters may pass quickly or slowly, in response to emotional states such as excitement or boredom. It can contract or expand, contracting to attention on a single present fact or state, or expanding to include simultaneous memories from one or more periods of past time. In this novel, Woolf pays much attention to the psychological time and shows great skill in the manipulation both of clock time and psychological time.
3.1 Clock Time vs. Psychological Time
The clock time is the external order that things happen, and psychological time is the time memory of past, present and future interlaced in one’s consciousness. In the first part, “the window”, the clock time is only an afternoon and dusk, but it
looks longer for recording Mrs. Ramsay and others’consciousness, inserting many memory and association. Though spanned an afternoon and evening, it covers one hundred and eighty-six pages, nearly two thirds of the whole book. Near the end of part one, Mrs. Ramsay sat at the table, recalling the good relationship between their and the Manning, she thought she could return to that dream land, that unreal but fascinating place at twenty years ago (Woolf, Lighthouse 87). The second part, “Time passes”, has ten years fleet but in external time it only takes one moment for the house was in vacancy. And the last part only narrates one morning.
In psychological, time is changing freely from past to future and to present, and interweaving with clock time. For instance, when Mr. Tansley accompany Mrs. Ramsay to the town, he insisted that the whether of the next day would be worse, Mrs. Ramsay thought: Odious little man, why go on saying that? She thought the comments her children give him, and occurred his “The little atheist”, verbalism, starched. And then, she noticed her children scooted after dinner, thus she remembered that one day after children went away, she felt his embarrassment and so asked his accompany to town (Lighthouse 9).。