The narrative art of To the Lighthouse is as follows:
Abstract: Virginia? As a famous British novelist, Woolf has made important contributions to modernist literature. To the Lighthouse is another typical stream of consciousness work after Woolf's The Room of Agreement and Mrs. Dalloway. In To the Lighthouse, Woolf abandons the omnibearing and omniscient narrative mode in traditional novels, adopts her own unique way of thinking, narrates the narrator's main line in the third person through various narrative artistic techniques such as inner monologue, free association and focus shift, reveals the complicated and changeable inner world of the characters, and constantly changes the narrative perspective, thus witnessing the unique narrative art of this work.
Virginia Woolf was born in London, England on 1980. She is an outstanding writer of stream of consciousness literature. She was praised by the world as a pioneer of feminism and modernism in the 20th century. Woolf pays more attention to the inner spiritual world of characters in literary creation. She believes that the writer's main task is to record all kinds of impressions engraved in his mind, such as strange, trivial and fleeting, and to describe the inner spirit of the characters, which is changeable, difficult to explain and describe, thus revealing the essential characteristics of the inner activities of the characters. Her literary creation concept thus determines the image of the ocean, and her classic "To the Lighthouse" is the inner reflection and emotional feeling of the characters in the novel on the real world at all stages of life.
The story of To the Lighthouse is extremely simple. Taking the behavior of going to the lighthouse as the central clue throughout the novel, this paper describes a holiday life experience of Ramsey's family and several guests before and after World War I, and Mrs. Ramsey's son James wants to go to the lighthouse. However, due to the weather, the planned ordinary trip was not smooth. After the outbreak of World War I, the Ramsey family suffered a lot. Mrs Ramsey died, and Mr Ramsey finally took his children and friends out to sea and reached the lighthouse. There is no gorgeous story in the whole novel. Simply put, it is composed of a series of inner activities such as impressions, memories and feelings, and the plot is diluted again and again. In this novel, Woolf boldly abandons the omni-directional and omniscient narrative mode in traditional novels, and narrates from the subjective perspective of the characters with a large number of limited perspectives, creating a brand-new vision for readers, so that readers can clearly feel the inner feelings and emotional changes of the characters and the changes of their consciousness during reading the novel. In addition, Woolf also changed the narrative perspective many times, re-established the consciousness of the whole character from all angles, thus showing a brand-new artistic effect.
soliloquy
Inner monologue refers to the conscious activity and psychological state directly expressed by the role hypothesis in the novel without any audience, mainly the silent stream of consciousness expressed in words. It can be said that inner monologue is the most important and basic method to create stream-of-consciousness works. It mainly reflects the inner activities and thinking of the characters, including memories of the past, thinking, analyzing and exploring the present, and speculating and predicting the future. It can not only reflect the shallow, clear and definite stream of consciousness activities of the story characters, but also reflect the deep, vague and hazy stream of consciousness activities of the story characters. Usually, the author will process or explain the consciousness of the characters to make it more logical and coherent, so that readers can better understand it. At the same time, the inner monologue can also be understood as? Become conscious? Examine the character's heart as a third-person narrator or through the narrator's heart. If the narrator is the viewer, then the character's heart will be watched; If the character is the viewer, then the world is watched.
When Woolf describes the lighthouse in To the Lighthouse, the narrator blends his thoughts into the thoughts of the character Lily, and the two are integrated to describe the development and change of Lily's spiritual world in a narrative depth. This is? Inner monologue? The real incarnation. Lily's inner monologue in the novel occupies a large space in the book, which contains many emotions such as memories, thoughts and fantasies, and the plot development of the novel is constantly changing and progressing according to the changes of her thoughts. In the first part of the novel? The window? In the chapter, Woolf tells the story of the Ramsey couple inviting their friends to the seaside for a holiday in a third-person narrative way. From this part of the description, readers can easily know Mrs. Ramsey's amiable, considerate and hospitable characteristics, and can also feel her care and love for friends, the poor and family. It seems that she is the incarnation of the virgin. Besides, Mrs Ramsey has the ability to control and infect others.
For example, a group of guests with different personalities attended the banquet at the seaside villa. And in the novel? Lighthouse? In this part, Woolf focuses on the reunion of seaside villas after many years. However, at this time, things changed and Mrs. Ramsey had passed away. Returning to the seaside villa together again has moved everyone and deeply. At this moment, the narrator is still in the heart of the artist Lily, remembering and imagining with the change of Lily's inner thoughts, thus revealing the different fates of different characters. In fact, this narrative method is also called stream of consciousness. For example, Lily opened the inspiration valve in her mind when she was painting. At forty, she is still withdrawn and indifferent. Mr. Ramsey longed for a little comfort and sympathy when he lost his wife, and she chose to refuse to give it; When Mr Ramsey took his children to the lighthouse, she quickly turned her attention to the drawing board in front of her and recalled Mrs Ramsey's unique ability to make things complicated and simple. When she described it in detail, she recalled the married life of Paul and Mintai, which was not the life is sweet that Mrs Ramsey sincerely expected. Throughout Lily's inner monologue, readers can learn many details, such as Mrs. Ramsey's efforts to fix Lily, but Banks failed to do so. These thoughts and feelings are always closely related to Mrs. Ramsey, and the painter Lily can finish the unfinished paintings here for many years, perhaps out of her subconscious mourning for Mrs. Ramsey.
Two free associations
Throughout the stream-of-consciousness novels, we can find that free association is also an important way to present the changes in the inner world of the characters, and it also brings a lot of confusion and incomprehension to readers when they understand the works. Because people's conscious activities will constantly change with the changes of time, place and content, it will inevitably require free association to make changes, and it is necessary to break the original traditional narrative mode and break through various restrictive conditions such as time and space. There is no unified or fixed form of free association, which is usually manifested in the fact that the story characters suddenly associate with other things or characters in the process of dealing with something, regardless of space and time. Therefore, this has become the most confusing place for readers in the process of reading the text.
Robert? Humphrey thinks that the three reasons that affect people's free association are memory, feeling and imagination. The free association in the novel To the Lighthouse is also inseparable from these three factors. Woolf used a lot of creative methods of stream of consciousness, among which the so-called "stream of consciousness" is the dominant one. Free association? . When creating works, Woolf often takes some seemingly simple or trivial things as an opportunity to connect with the inner world of the characters and give them unlimited free association. This narrative art is clearly shown in Mrs Ramsey.
In the chapter "To the Lighthouse", Mrs. Ramsey measures socks for her son, which should have been finished in a few minutes, but the author Woolf used four and a half pages of pen and ink. When Mrs Ramsey was measuring socks for James, Lily and Banks walked by the window, saw the chairs and rooms in front of them, and then warned James. This series of seemingly irregular free associations actually has its realistic incentives. For example, Mrs Ramsey saw Lily and Banks walk through the window, which triggered her association with their marriage. Seeing the room triggers its association with the situation of the room and books; From the sadness that socks are too short, I think of Banks' praise for his appearance. All these associations are true, appropriate and natural.
In addition, we can find that these free associations of Woolf seem to be irregular on the surface, but if we read through the whole work, we will find that they are closely related internally. From a certain point of view, almost every association lays the foundation for the subsequent story development. Most notably, in this chapter, Mrs Ramsey is related to other people such as Banks, which enables readers to understand Mrs Ramsey from many angles.
Trifocal conversion
When readers first read Woolf's To the Lighthouse, the beginning of the article can easily give people a dull feeling. But if readers can read patiently and really go deep into all kinds of characters, they will be deeply attracted by the mirage-like beauty and doubts in the novel. Because To the Lighthouse is called a classic, it is an important narrative art technique and a clever use of focus change. Woolf describes the relationships between characters and narrators, and between characters with the help of the artistic technique of focus shift, which constitutes a multi-perspective narrative method.
The traditional way of writing novels is to focus on omniscience, that is, the narrator acts as the understanding of everything in the story? Almighty? . However, in To the Lighthouse, Woolf completely abandons the traditional narrative perspective, but uses the limited focus perspective of the role to show the readers the characters' thoughts and feelings. The reality of the novel shows Woolf's extraordinary imagination, creativity and the driving force of focus shift. The random switching of ideology between characters truly and naturally makes the instantaneous consciousness and psychological activities of characters immortal and achieves excellent results. The mutual switching of focus perspectives not only makes each perspective complement each other step by step, but also strengthens readers' perception and witness. At the same time, it can expand the narrative scope, promote the narrative characteristics of the whole creation to be more fluent and free, and help readers perceive the inner activities of the characters from multiple levels. This is very prominent in the image-building of Mrs. Ramsey, the story character. Mrs. Ramsey's personality and image are mainly reflected by the focused perspectives of different roles.
In the first part? The window? Banks praised Mrs Ramsey's cooking and thought that Mrs Ramsey was an amazing and admirable woman. The perspective of this chapter is extremely vivid. First, the narrator can fully understand the situation of the restaurant, and he can also hear Banks' praise for Mrs. Ramsey. Then there is Mrs. Ramsey's subtle visual feelings, and she is eager to be recognized; Finally, banks' feelings about food. These perspectives finally focused on Mrs Ramsey, who deeply felt the admiration and admiration of Banks.
In To the Lighthouse, there are many such narrative arts. By paying attention to the mutual transformation of perspectives, Woolf fully expounds the complex emotions, psychological States and emotional fluctuations of the characters in the story. Auerbach, a famous German scholar, once said that the basic feature of Woolf's creative skills is that readers can feel the stream of consciousness of multi-task roles, rather than the performance of a single person's ideology, and the consciousness of these roles is constantly switching with each other. Of course, changing the focus too frequently will bring many misunderstandings to readers. However, if you carefully taste the works, readers will easily find that Woolf's personal name and daily habits of characters will change when changing perspectives, and at the same time, it will be accompanied by skillful use of parenthesis, such as? Does she want to? ,? She longed for it? Words, such as English, make the language have certain regularity and add a lot of colors.