ABSTRACT Title of Document: BRITISH MODERNIST ... - DRUM

ground of any rival solutions to Lily’s plot. The third part of To the Lighthouse
surpasses these classic resolutions, moving beyond the endings they propose, to
brother-sister links, to male-female friendship, and, even more, to a vision that
overwhelms all the binary systems on which the novel has been built.” (DuPlessis
96). “Time Passes” destroys (often by fulfilling) any number of more traditional
narrative possibilities. When Prue Ramsay is married, and then dies “in some illness
connected with childbirth,” both events noted in a reporterly manner in brackets, in
the span of about a page. Meanwhile, Mrs. Ramsay’s death comes early in “Time
Passes,” quickly quashing any expectations that she will take her son to the
lighthouse. Indeed, from the moment “Time Passes” slips from a narrative of the
night following “The Window” into a more rapid movement through time by
ruminating at the opening of its third section, “But what after all is one night?” (127),
Mrs. Ramsay’s promise of a journey the next fine day has receded from a possibility
of near-term fulfillment. “Time Passes,” by taking the reader to the moment of
fulfillment ten years later, implies that personal, impersonal, and world events have
taken the possibility of the next fine day out of the temporal scale of what can broadly
be termed the stream-of-consciousness tradition. The passage of time eliminates
many conventional narrative possibilities, leaving the more symbolic narratives (the
journey to the lighthouse, Lily Briscoe’s attempt to paint a portrait of Mrs. Ramsay)
as possibilities. 12 In this non-teleological narrative universe, a complete narrative is
produced through connections that are produced between temporally disparate events:
12 Humphrey describes the form of To the Lighthouse and Woolf’s other stream-of-consciousness
narratives as “symbolic design” (102). The overall design is effected, however, not by stream of
consciousness proper, but by its disruption in “Time Passes,” as extreme internal focalization is
mostly replaced by zero and external focalization.
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