by Mercedes Czlapinski

Created on: May 30, 2009

Interpreting To the Lighthouse through "Modern Fiction"

The critical essay, "Modern Fiction," by Virginia Woolf, reflects upon the development of modern fiction. Woolf attempts to come to an understanding of modern fiction and how it works. She considers what it should be about, the effects it has on the audience, and how it departs from past traditions. These issues that the essay raises are relevant to interpreting many contemporary novels. By reading "Modern Fiction," Woolf's readers can enhance their understanding of her complex novel, To the Lighthouse.

In "Modern Fiction," Virginia Woolf tries to come to an understanding of modern fiction by considering what fiction should be about. In order to come to a conclusion about what fiction should portray, Wool comments upon what fiction should not portray. In her essay, Woolf considers a person's everyday life. She asks her readers to study an ordinary day wherein there is "no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest," but rather a "myriad [of] impressions - trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel" (2432). Woolf ultimately concludes that fiction should be about life. She states that authors of modern fiction should be praised because "their work has a living, breathing, everyday imperfection, which bids [their readers] to take what liberties with it [they] choose" (2430). Woolf thinks that fiction should reflect our thoughts and our mental state of being rather than our conversations and our actions. It is through these thoughts and emotions that people form relationships and communicate, not through the dialogue they speak and the actions they perform.

Woolf rarely gives her readers the satisfaction of a plot in her novel To the Lighthouse. In fact, there is no plot up until the second section of the novel, "Time Passes". In this section, Woolf adds brackets containing bits of plot that focus mainly on tragedy: "[Prue Ramsay died that summer in some illness connected with childbirth, which was indeed a tragedy, people said, everything they said, had promised so well]" (136). Woolf does this to further convey her message that it is not about what people do or what happens to the people that is important, but rather what is thought about what happened to them and how people feel about what happened to them that holds significance.

In order to portray life in these novels, many authors use a style known as stream of consciousness,

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