Mr. Ramsay: A Character Made Real Through Others

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Character Development in To the Lighthouse Mr. Ramsay: A Character Made Real Through Others In Virginia Woolf’s modernist fiction work, To the Lighthouse, a unique style of writing is employed: stream of consciousness. Woolf writes not to explain a plot focused around action or physical events, but to convey the actual thought processes of these characters, as if someone were to “examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day” (Woolf). Her objective was to explain what happens while thinking, but though words on paper. “The mind receives a myriad impressions-trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel” Woolf says of human thought in her essay, Modern Fiction. The result of this take on how fiction should be written is somewhat confusing and often hard to follow, as is should be; no one’s thoughts are the same as another’s. Additionally, without the presence of an omniscient narrator (except in Time Passes), the book would be similar to a work simply told in first person. Woolf has remedied this by also using changing narrators. The switches are not marked by new sections, chapters, or even paragraphs, the shifts are completely unmarked; while reading one will simply notice a change, in tone, diction, style, and subject. Naturally, these techniques would affect the character development of the characters. Instead of knowing only how a character views himself and his own personal thoughts, as it would be with a first person narrative, readers can also be privy to other characters’ thoughts, opinions, and personal experiences about this character. When the readers can be aware of these views simultaneously, the result is a better understanding of the character. The character development of Mr. Ramsay presents this benefit of Woolf’s stream of consciousness style clearly in section one, The Window. The views readers get from

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