The Expansion and Contraction of Narrative Time in To the Lighthouse (Lok Sang) Jeffrey To College

Time is more personal than the sequential ticking of seconds on a clock. We do not measure our lives in uniform progression: some moments drag on for days, while others disappear in meager seconds. In Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, wherein Woolf describes at great length a day at the Ramsay summerhouse while compressing ten years of narration to a dozen pages, she aptly delineates the sentiment that time—the concept we take to be an orderly and uniform progression from past to future—is neither orderly nor uniform. In her novel time expands and contracts; time parallels the depth of the character’s experiences where even the most fleeting of moments occasionally transcend temporality to become something more permanent and significant—something that, as Woolf puts it, “remains” (105). Ultimately, while the expansion and contraction of narrative time underscores the ephemerality of living, it resolves this existential quandary by proposing that life is not measured by its length as in a clock or calendar time, but by the meaning and significance instilled within every transient moment.

First, Woolf’s expansion of time lends a greater awareness of life’s ephemerality. While she suspends every second of reflection as a stream...