Talk:To the Lighthouse

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"Large parts of Woolf's novel don't concern themselves with the objects of vision, but rather investigate the means of perception, attempting to understand people in the act of looking."

--This appears to be lifted from a critic (Davies presumably), without being recognizable as a characteristic of TtL. I don't see how this is at all helpful in any "encyclopedia" sense. If we're doing lit crit here, then I could certainly unload my notions about the book -- but we're not supposed to be doing criticism, are we?

Similarly, the notion that the book has an "omniscient narrator" is inadequate, as if Woolf were Dickens. The narrator's perspective travels from one character to another, so that we're given a look into their thoughts without moving into first person or direct transcription. "Free indirect discourse," if you will. --Andersonblog 21:02, 9 October 2006 (UTC)

"To the Lighthouse follows and extends the tradition of modernist novelists like Marcel Proust and James Joyce, where the plot is secondary to philosophical introspection, and the prose can be winding and hard to follow."

--I don't have a problem with "winding prose," but I do have a problem with "hard to follow;" this is a critical and not a detached or objective passage. CapnFafhrd (talk) 19:00, 12 April 2008 (UTC)