Ramsay, for instance, is a charmingly warm and beautiful woman, yet annoyingly concerned with ordering the lives of others, as is clear from the resentment which many of her circle show against her mania for marriage. It soon becomes evident that no one single trait or characteristic of a person can be seized upon and cherished in order to know him or her. Part 1 of the novel deals chiefly with the relation of self to others. To the Lighthouse shows us various fictional characters, trying with various degrees of success to establish relationship with the people.

Further, the overall quality of this relationship may be subsumed under the headings of order, a triumph over life’s meaningless flux and chaos, a giving way to its all but irresistible force, or a blank confrontation of its stark emptiness”. The novel can be seen to have been built around the problem of how the knower looks at the known, how one person looks at another, how man looks at nature, and how the artist looks at life. “And it is exactly this problem which works its way through the novel on three levels human relations, metaphysics and aesthetics. In answer to a question of Lily about the content of his father’s books, Andrew replies, “Subject and object and the nature of reality”. But a closer study of the novel shows that this either or strategy is not adequate for dealing with the multiplicity of points of view through which each character is seen in the first section, the descending and the ascending movement of the second section, and the shifting simultaneity of events which shapes the third.

The full significance of the trip to the lighthouse is not grasped. These examples could be multiplied, but the dominant tendency is to interpret the thematic conflict as an antithesis of two mutually exclusive terms, one of which must be rejected in favour of the other.

Lily briscoe to the lighthouse