The Walk with the headlight

the Walk with the headlight , ( To the Lighthouse , also translated Towards the headlight ) is a novel of Virginia Woolf published in May 1927.

The account, free and polyphonic, concentrates on the Ramsay family, and their visits in the island of Skye in Scotland between 1910 and 1920.

the Walk with the headlight follows and develops the tradition of modernistic novelists like Marcel Proust and James Joyce in which the intrigue is secondary with philosophical introspection. The writing can be sinuous and difficult to follow. The novel contains few dialogs and almost not action. It is especially composed of thoughts and observations of the main characters. Among those are detached Mrs. Ramsay, prototype of the mother attached to the traditional values, and Lily Briscoe, figure of the artist who is characterized by his research from independence.

The novel points out the importance of the emotions felt during childhood and underlines the brittleness of the adult relations. One of the many topics of the book is the universality of the transitory one.

Major topics

The complexity of the experiment

Long passages of the novel do not concentrate on the object observed but rather on the glance of the protagonist, describing by there the report/ratio which the observer with the world maintains which surrounds it. According to its diary, Woolf spent much time to listen itself to think in order to how study the words and the emotions came to him to mind in reaction so that it perceived.

Narration and setting in prospect

The novel has of external narrator only in his second part. All the remainder of the intrigue is held while following the wire of the thoughts of each character. This absence of external narrator implies that no reading of work is imposed from the start and that the reader must forge his own opinion progressively development of the characters whose thoughts are morally ambiguous.

Whereas in its first part, the novel concentrates on the description of the relation of the character to the events and to the external objects, its second part, which is not related to any character, presents the events differently. Woolf described there the events from the point of view of a narrator located out of the action, which is not related to any the characters, so that the events are perceived as anchored in time. Thus, the narration appears fuzzy and distorted, example of what Woolf called " life such as it is when part" there is not taken;.

Allusions to real places

Leslie Stephen, father of the writer and supposed model of the character of Mr. Ramsay, put in hiring Talland House at St Ives in 1882, shortly after birth of Virginia, and it was used as second home with the family during the 10 summers which followed. The décri place in the principal history of the walk to the headlight - the island of Hebridean and the house which is there - is with the image of Talland House. Many details of bay of St Ives are present in the history, in particular the gardens leading to the sea, the sea itself and the headlight.

Although, in the novel, the Ramsay family succeeds in turning over in the house after the war, the Stephen family had at this abandoned time the house. After the war, Virginia Woolf and its Vanessa sister returned visit to the new owner of Talland House and, well after the death of his/her parents, Woolf once again the voyage reiterated

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