Words to Myself in Solitude

The lighthouse as a light-emitting instrument of nautical guidance of ships to shore has come also to represent symbolically a path to personal realization and personal fulfillment. A beacon of hope, if you will.

While the “lighthouse” is the controlling symbol of Virginia Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse” in it, it seems to symbolize how unattainable personal realization and personal fulfillment are in our lives. It narrates the frustrated attempts at human contact and human connection. As this deficit of communication persists existence exhibits its ephemeral nature; things change, people die.  We like to think something will last forever, but of course it doesn't.  The retreat to solitude may be just the respite we need from futile attempts at authentic interchange.

Two passages of the novel illustrate this: James Ramsay, age six, anticipates a voyage to the Lighthouse tomorrow.  He is at the side of his mother; she is his protector from his father who seems to get satisfaction in telling his son that the voyage won't be possible because of bad weather; indeed the voyage does not happen because of inclement weather. Soon his mother dies suddenly.

Time passes, ten years to be exact. During these years James's sister, Prue, dies giving birth to her child and his brother, Andrew dies in the war.  Existence is indeed ephemeral.

The long delayed voyage takes place with James, his sister Cam, and his father Mr. Ramsay. The narrator tells the reader, "James looked at the Lighthouse. He could see the white-washed rocks; the tower, stark and straight; he could see that it was barred with black and white; he could see windows in it; he could even see washing spread on the rocks to dry. So that was the Lighthouse, was it? No, the other was also the Lighthouse. For nothing was simply one thing. The other Lighthouse was true too. It was sometimes hardly to be seen across the bay. In the evening one looked up and saw the eye opening and shutting and the light seemed to reach them in that airy sunny garden where they sat."  While the Lighthouse is not what James anticipated as a young Knight Gallant he realizes this too is the Lighthouse and that "nothing is simply one thing." 

In a passage in which Mr. Ramsay and Mrs. Ramsay are physically near each other, the narrator tells the thoughts of each of them and these show a great degree of emotional aloofness and separation between them.  Mr. Ramsay wants his wife's sympathy and confirmation of her love for him and she is unable to give these to him. Her thoughts reveal, "it was painful to be reminded of the inadequacy of human relationships, that the most perfect was flawed, and could not bear the examination." The reader might at this point hope that the "flawed" relationship of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay would undergo a change that would make communication and connection possible, but, unfortunately, Mrs. Ramsay suddenly perishes alone. And any hope of resolution perishes with her.

While "To the Lighthouse" is not usually characterized as an existential story it shows the obstacles that make the search for authentic meaning in a world that comes with no preordained meaning so intractable and so problematic. Each of the characters in a sense seem to be acting out a prescribed cultural role that limits the radical freedom that Sartre says is possible and is desirable.  While circumstances in life do change, sometimes considerably, people and their makeup seldom do.