Hmm, interesting novel. It took me a long time to figure out if I was enjoying the novel. I'm happy I read it, certainly. It was an unusual novel, having very little dialogue, little "plot" in the traditional sense, no protagonist, and no main conflict. However, it did portray the sensibilities of several characters, and the fact that it lacked the elements found in traditional novels was appropriate since Woolf was attempting to portray the inner lives of people as closely as she could. Life has no "plot", and what happens inside ourselves--our perceptions of life and each other, and what we make of our experiences--is as important as what happens outside ourselves (i.e., the experiences themselves).
The novel struck me as autobiographical, though I know little about Woolf. I remember reading a brief excerpt from her nonfiction that was used on an AP Language and Composition test one year. In it, she recounted an experience on a boat with her father and brother, a scene which closely mirrored the trip to the lighthouse with Cam, James, and their father. It seemed to me that Cam was supposed to represent Woolf in the novel, although Lily also seemed to share some of her sensibilities as well and was the same age as Woolf when she wrote it. The text was difficult to follow at times, and I found myself drifting off on several occasions, scanning whole paragraphs without really reading them. Although the novel was very short--barely 200 pages--it took me longer to read than I thought it should. The lack of dialogue, the long paragraphs, and the serpentine, complicated syntax was off-putting but still artistically impressive. I can see how the book can be considered the quintessential Modernist novel. She definitely moved beyond the prose style and novel structure of most other novelists of the time.
This is a novel I'll have to return to eventually.
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So, this comment is long overdue, but I found myself with some time this afternoon and for whatever reason, this popped into my head. By "this" I mean the thought of responding to your reading of To the Lighthouse.
When I first read To the Lighthouse (as part of a graduate school course), I was kind of in the same boat as you, at least as you discuss it in your first paragraph. I didn't quite know what to think of it. I had read Mrs. Dalloway and actually decided that I liked Mrs. Dalloway more mostly because Mrs. Dalloway had more of a story or plot, albeit not much more. I also like Septimus Smith a lot, a character in Mrs. Dalloway, and didn't latch onto any character in To the Lighthouse. I did, like you, recognize that there was something significant, but didn't quite grasp "it" or really care to know exactly what "it" was.
I had to read it again a year or two later when I was a grader for an undergraduate course. The students were writing papers on it so I felt that I should reread it. I ended up reading it in one sitting at a coffeehouse in Providence, which was one of the most enjoyable experiences of my life. I'm not a fast reader, so I haven't had a lot of experiences reading through a story like that. But, for whatever reason something clicked that day and I was really in the zone and since then I've been an even bigger fan of Woolf and To the Lighthouse.
The one thing that I "got" was Woolf's vision of life and the meaning of it. Or, I guess another way to put it is how/where to find the meaning of life. She has a lot of sea imagery in the novel, a lot of quotes about the chaotic nature of the ocean, which I took to refer to the inherently chaotic nature of life. But, then she has moments where she describes the way the sea will come together to form waves and it is in moments like that where the meaning or significance of life lies. The moment where the mother unifies all of the disparate members of the dinner party is one such moment. The completion of Lily's painting is another moment. Anyway, this is getting too long, but the gist of what I'm saying is that I was affected by that idea.
Life to me is inherently chaotic and mostly meaningless, but there are moments that come together beautifully and that make it all worthwhile and meaningful.
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