The problem of time in novel has long been an important matter of critical concern since 1920. It is not held that the worth of any novel can be measured wholly in terms of the success with which the time-element is treated ones, that go to the making...
The problem of time in novel has long been an important matter of critical concern since 1920. It is not held that the worth of any novel can be measured wholly in terms of the success with which the time-element is treated ones, that go to the making of a great novel. All that is claimed, and the claim is a big one, is that the time-element in fiction is of major importance, that in a Large measure it determines the author's choice and treatment of his subject, the way he articulates and arranges the elements of his narrative, and the way he uses language to express his sense of the prose and meaning of living. Of all the generalizations about the novel, perhaps the safest would be the statement that more importance is being attached to what the characters think and how they think, less and less to what they do. This study of time and the novel ends with the consideration, of some aspects of modern fiction.
As a writer, the most important thing for her is to communicate what is her 'reality' and 'Time' to readers. Her whole life as a writer is a long journey looking for the most effective method to achieve this purpose.
The purpose of this paper is to show the problem of time in the Woolf's novel and the form, the medium is conditioned by certain ineluctable time-factors : how, in other words, the whole technique of fiction is involved with time, through the stream of conscious novels by Virginia Woolf's novel. Never perhaps have our feelings about time changed 20 radically and assumed such importance in our eyes as in this century. Besides the question of the angle of vision a number of other problems confront the novelist one of them concerns time. The novel describes the working out of a multiplicity of incidents, logically connected, in which the leading actors undergo a deeper change of personality or moral outlook as a consequence of their experience. Or else, if our novel is not primarily dramatic, but instead a social chronicle, it offers a broad view of the manners of society, also must indicate gradually that time is passing but, of course, time is intangible. When the books ends, we do not feel that this is truly the finish, but that times goes. The cycle of birth and growth, death and birth again. Modern are reflects an obsession with time which is as ridiculous as that of the Victorians with morality. As fiction is a time-art, the problem of its structure, conventions and techniques form a veritable arabesque of different time-values and factors.
In to the Lighthouse, woolf emphasies the androgynous aspects between the two sexes through the Ramsays who are representative of masculinity and feminity. Woolf makes Lily, a possessor of an objective view point and an artistic self, look squarely at the masculinity and feminity of the Ramsays. All woolf's characters share this intense preoccupation with the living moment. For them there is no past, no future : merely the moment in its ring light. The major purpose of woolf was the communication through fiction of sense of reality. Her reality, as distinct from realism, is an inward subjective awareness. Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse satisfies us both for its formal structure and for the contrast of two principles - the life of art and the art of living - principles which find their resolution at the very end of the novel.
The final version of the novel was indeed divided as the had envisaged : part Ⅰ, The window : part Ⅱ, Time passes : part Ⅲ, the Lighthouse. In part Ⅰ of the novel, "The Window", We are introduced to the Ramsay family and friends, holidaying for the summer on a remote and unparticularised Hebridean island. The second part of the novel, "Time passes", is a poetic, impressionistic depiction of the changes which be fall the house and it's inhabitants over a period of ten years. The third and final section of To the Lighthouse, "The Lighthouse depicts the return visit to the house by the remaining Ramsays and their long-delayed expedition to the lighthouse.
Virginia Woolf suggests that most of our lives are made up of "non-being" punctuated by brief flashes of "moments of being" which she relates generally to art. Perhaps by internalizing time and making it the vehicle of the moment of artistic knowledge, the modernists hoped to disengage themselves from the most intimate aspect of industrial control. To the lighthouse is also a study of human relationships. As Mrs. Dalloway seek in party giving a link with the stream of life, so Mrs. Ramsay gathers a party of houseguests whose interrelationships with her family and with one another help to suggest, if not to define, the meaning of life. The arrival of the Ramsays at the lighthouse coincide with the completion of Lily's picture, and each event adds a depth of symbolic meaning to the others bringing all levels of the novel to a satisfying conclusion.
There are three time elements inherent in the material of Woolf's novels. The first and most obvious was an element of actual present time, an element which carried the narrative forward, which represented characters and events as living in the present and moving forward into a immediate future. The second time element was of past time. In addition to these two time elements, there was a third which I conceived as being time immutable, a kind of eternal and unchanging universe of time against which would be projected the transience of man's life, the bitter briefness of his day. The moment of intuition that punctuate Woolf's books mark the points where the tree elements meet and fuse in a flash of blinding vision. It is claimed that the time element in fiction is closely related to these three facets, to the conventions of fiction and to the conception of reality.