Time Aesthetics Of To The Lighthouse By Virginia Woolf

To The Lighthouse, one of the many outstanding creations by Virginia Woolf, features ingenious representation of "stream of consciousness", in which the author applied her literary proposition of subjective realism, whose first object is human consciousness so impressively to uncover the inner world of personal feelings and probe into the nature of human souls, that the novel's content and form got mingled together perfectly. In particular, Woolf employed psychological time which is different from traditional physical time to construct the frame of its plots.In this work, "double concentric circles construction" was also adopted to deal with the relationship between clock time and psychological time so as to form a cyclic construction and an alternating rhythm of narration which hinge on the theme closely. In the course of narration, "narrative time" frequently alternated with "time of consciousness flowing", the narrative effects of which were deliberately intensified by Woolf, and the inner logic of the narration was thereby established. Through the comparison between these two parts in the work, the author's dissatisfaction and indignation about the secular world were reflected.To treat psychological time in TTL, an often used technique which allowed Woolf to inject multifarious consciousness into the characters is the exploitation of retrospective memories in which the novel's motif took root deeply, that is to recall the past, recollect the lost memory, and preserve the truth of life.In brief, the purpose of this study is to reveal the unique aesthetic value of TTL that can be attributed to its seamless treatment of time.