Ducation of republic of uzbekistan. Andizhan state university named after zakhiriddin mukhammad babur

2 . Virginia Woolf’s “The Waves” and the moral of the story
Virginia Woolf wrote in 1927:I meant nothing by The Lighthouse. One has to have a central line down the middle of the book, to hold the design together. I saw that all sorts of feelings would accrue to this, butI refused to think them out, and trusted that people would make it the deposit for their own emotions – which they have done, one thinking it means one thing another another. I can’t manage Symbolism except in this vague, generalised way. Whether its [sic] right or wrong I don’t know; but directly I’m told what a thing means, it becomes hateful to me.^[At first sight, this statement seems to be a contradiction to what she stated in her theory of symbols, namely that symbols should be used consciously. But in fact, she uses it intentionally as the function of the lighthouse is to evoke the reader’s imagination. She wants the lighthouse to mean various things to various readers. As there have been so many attempts to interpret the function of the lighthouse in the novel, her idea worked out in a more than satisfying way.The lighthouse functions in two ways: as something to be reached, and as the source of a flashing light.
But not only the physical presence of the lighthouse becomes important. It also exists within the consciousness of individual characters. The symbolic meanings of the lighthouse differ, change and are even contrasted in different contexts and with regard to different characters in the novel. Due to these multiple and varying meanings, the lighthouse carries the narrative forward.The first mentioning of the lighthouse is very realistic and primarily negative. It describes the disadvantages of having to live and work in a lighthouse.… to give those poor fellows who must be bored to death sitting all day with nothing to do but polish the lamp and trim the wick and rake about on their scrap of garden, something to amuse them. For how would you like to be shut up for a whole month at a time, and possibly more in stormy weather, upon a rock the size of a tennis lawn?
She would ask; and to have no letters or newspapers, and to see nobody; if you were married, not to see your wife, not to know how your children were, - if they were ill, if they had fallen down and broken their legs or arms; to see the same dreary waves breaking week after week, and then a dreadful storm coming, and the windows covered with spray, and birds dashed against the lamp, and the whole place rocking,T.E. Apter. Virginia Woolf – A Study of Her Novels. London: Macmillan Press, 1979, Mitchell A. Leaska. The Novels of Virginia Woolf – From Beginning to End. New York: John Jay Press, 1977, A survey of some interpretations by various critics can be found in: Christoph Schöneich. Virginia Woolf. Darmstadt: WBG, 1989, Margaret Drabble, ed. Virginia Woolf – To the Lighthouse. New York: OUP, 1999, (From now on, quotations taken from the novel will be indicated with: To the Lighthouse + page number.) In Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, a few critics have realized the momentousness of symbolism, a corollary to its poetic and lyrical nature which they may extol or censure but can’t come up to scratch to acquiesce in.Virginia’s intuition is more abstract than that of Henry or James Joyce. She had an almost mystic assurance of a “reality” behind and within the façade of the temporal. She proclaims In the novel, To the Lighthouse the emblematic design oversees everything but it has no definite schema. It is rather like the great scroll of smoke. All the symbols are interwoven and this great work of fiction concentrates on them. In To the lighthouse, the light house is a substantial symbol that manifests Mrs. Woolf’s central idea that she insinuates in the novel or upon which the whole novel is woven. The tower is frequently shadowed in mist; its glints are intermitted in the murk. Its light signifies reality or truth that strengthens its states even through the twilight of nascence. The lighthouse is an enigma but it also pertains to day-to-day living. It is manmade, something is immutable and steadfast that man has built in the flux of time to guide and overcome those at the clemency of its cataclysmic forces. From this facet, it gives the impression to be related to the human tradition and its values, which subsists from generation to generation and tell of both the integrity or community and progression of man. Man tends to its light, which propels its streaks out over the dark waters to those on the Island and so establishes communication with them and illumines them. Ramsay’s family’s aptitude at the lighthouse that they contemplate to go in the first part of the novel, symbolizes the aptitude of an artist. If a person is an artist in true aura, he must return towards reality or truth after imagination.Firstly, Mrs. Ramsay and her family set out to stop by the lighthouse in the winds but due to bad weather unfavourable climatic conditions, they have to set aside their programme. In second chapter, though most judicious ménage pushes up the daisies and Mrs.
Ramsay herself kicks the bucket, but in the last part of the novel, remaining persons, at length, succeed in visiting the lighthouse with flying colours. Lily Briscoe’s accomplishment of her painting is also symbolic to a great extent. She neither in first nor in second part of the work of fiction can be able to complete her picture. In the whole period that contains more than a decade, she is perplexed about to fill the gap of her picture, but at the lighthouse, she executes her production. This symbolizes that an artist can be impeccable in his art when he reaches and finds the final limitations of reality or truth. Mrs. Ramsay’s knitting of stockings is also the symbol of the notion that she crochets in her consciousness. The thoughts, through which she knits novel’s first part like knitting stockings for lighthouse’s keeper’s son. Her analysis of every person or character of the novel, her matchmaking, her role at the dinner party and many other actions weave the novel as she knits the stockings. Mrs. Ramsay said, the sea is the symbol of eternal flux of life and time a mid which all we exist. Life ceaselessly changes its characters. Sea is the sign of life as it has altered its visitors from first part to third part of the novel. Mrs. Ramsay hankers for its visit with his clan but she has been incapable to do so as a person in her life of ten falls flat to frame her firmness of findings.
After a decade, other characters supplant her and visits Sea or lighthouse. To Mrs. Ramsay, the sea at one moment sounds soothing and consoling like a cradle song. As life is sometimes ravishingly beautiful with all its munificence and blessing to human beings so is the case with the sea according to Mrs. Ramsay. In the long run, we can sanguinely remark that Virginia Woolf’s symbols in the novel “To the Lighthouse” revolve round life, flair and facts. In the point of fact, she clears out her outlook of bond of life, art and reality. Written from multiple perspectives and shifting between times and characters with poetic grace, To The Lighthouse is not concerned with ordinary story telling. Rather through integrate symbolic web it reads the mind and recounts the passage of multiple experiences of different characters in the novel.The key symbols in To The Lighthouse are are – the sea, the lighthouse, Lily’s painting, the window, and the personalities of Mrs. Ramsay and Mr. Ramsay. They are all woven together, along with many other less important ones, into a central meaning, which suggests Mrs. Woolf’s conception of life and reality. Let them study closely under the following heads. The sea with its waves is to be heard throughout the novel. It symbolizes the eternal flux of time and life, in the midst of which we all exist; it constantly changes its character. To Mrs. Ramsay at one moment it sounds soothing and consoling like a cradlesong, at others, “like a ghostly roll of drums remorselessly beating a warning of death it brings terror. Sometimes its power “sweeping savagely in, “seems to reduce the individual to nothingness, at others it sends up ‘a fountain of bright water” – which seems to match the sudden springs of vitality in the human spirit.  The lighthouse holds a whole cluster of suggestions. It is a mystery, yet a concern for day-to-day living. It is at once distant and close at the mercy of its destructive forces. The lighthouse surrounded by sea always illumines and clarifies the human condition in someway. Farther, it is the quest for the values the lighthouse suggests. The tower is frequently shadowed in mist, its beams are intermittent in the darkness, the moments of assurance they bring the momentary, but upon these assurances reality rests, by landing on the general doubts, something which seems to triumph over the eternal cycle of change. To reach the lighthouse is to establish a creative relationship.  Indeed, the lighthouse is the most important symbol and different critics have explained it in different ways. For example Russel declares that the lighthouse is the feminine creative principle. Jon Bennett calls the alternate light and shadows of the lighthouse the rhythm of joy and sorrow, understanding and misunderstanding. F.L. Overcarsh, finds the novel as a whole an allegory of the old and New Testements: Mrs. Ramsay is Eve, the Blessed virgin and Chirst; Mr. Ramsay is among other things God the Father; the lighthouse is Eden and Heaven. The strokes of the lighthouse are the persons of the Trinity, the third of them, long and steady representing the Holy Ghost.
The lighthouse as symbol has not one meaning, that it is a vital synthesis of time and eternity: an objective correlative for Mrs. Ramsay’s vision, after whose death it is her meaning. It is from the window that we have the little of the part-I of To The Lighthouse. It is not a transparent but a separating sheet of glass between reality and Mrs. Ramsay’s mind. Mrs. Ramsay experiences such moments of revelation and integration at watching the window. It is the very symbol of the imperfection of our knowledge and riddle of human mind. It is debates about philosophy, particularly theories about visual reality on the three main philosophers of British empiricism, John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume. The basic argument of empiricism is whether or not a person can be empirically certain that objects have a distinct and continued existence apart from our perceptions of them. The characters are carefully arranged in the novel in their relation to each other, so that a definite symbolic pattern emerges. Mrs. Ramsay pervades the whole book. Mrs. Ramsay is the mother of the Ramsay family who dies during the middle section of the novel. A beautiful, caring woman, she means all things to all people, and each character of To the Lighthouse has a different perception of her personality. Lily sees her as a mother, and doesn’t think she has ever inspired romantic passion. William Bankes and Charles Tansley adore her, and think she doesn’t realize how beautiful she is. The children see her as the “Lighthouse” of their lives—the stable, warm force that protects and guides them.
She is above all the creator of fertile human relationships symbolized by her love of match making and her knitting; and of warm comfort symbolized by her green shawl. Just as Mrs. Ramsay stands for creative vitality, so Mr. Ramsay stands as the symbol of the sterile, destructive barriers to relationship. Just as Mrs. Ramsay is described in images of fertility and the warmth and comfort of love and harmony with others, Mr. Ramsay is evoked in images of sterility, hardness and cruelty and of deliberate isolation. It is to be noted that Mr. Ramsay is the father of the family is the most misunderstood character in the book, a man whose children hate him because they think he is viciously unemotional and cold. Lily sees that Mrs. Ramsay’s gift of harmonizing human relationship into memorable moments is “almost like a work of art” and in the book art is the ultimate symbol for the enduring ‘reality’. In life, as Mrs. Ramsay herself well knows relationships are doomed to imperfection, and are the spot of time and change; but in art the temporal and the eternal unity in an unchanging form-through, as in Lily’s picture, the form may be very inadequate. We cannot doubt that Lily’s struggles with the composition and texture of her painting are a counter part of Virginia Woolf’s tussles and triumphs in her own medium, but she chooses poetry as the image that reminds mankind that the ever changing can yet become immortal. Lily is a Postimpressionist painter, descendant of a poor family, and has spent most of her life taking care of her father. In many ways, Lily is the chorus figure of the book—providing the histories of the characters and commenting on their actions. The beginning and completion of her painting form the frame of To the Lighthouse, and her final line, “I have had my vision,” is the final line of the novel, acting as Woolf's own comme. Among her many literary accomplishments, Virginia Woolf is perhaps best known for the daring and inventive narration she used throughout her writing. Of all of her novels, The Waves, which was published in 1931, implements some of the most innovative and bold narration that Woolf employed.
Woolf was born in 1882 and spent much of her life around some of England's most important thinkers. She began writing early and published her first novel, The Voyage Out, in 1915. Woolf quickly established a reputation as an innovative writer and would go on to write numerous novels, short stories, and pieces of nonfiction. Of all of her works, The Waves, her seventh novel, is considered one of her most daring and challenging. Woolf suffered from mental illness throughout her entire life, and in 1941, she took her own life. Towards the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, science and philosophy challenged traditional understandings of how people perceive and interpret the world around them. Additionally, a more complicated and fast-paced lifestyle (combined with the experience of witnessing the atrocities that occurred during World War I) also challenged people to rethink their conception of reality. Faced with this new context, many artists believed that it was necessary to create art that reflected the complicated reality of the world we live in. This movement came to be known as modernism and is defined by its use of innovative and often abstract art As a modernist writer, Woolf was interested in depicting reality as fragmented and one of the most direct and influential ways she did this was through her unique stream-of-conscious narration. This style of narration involves entering in and out of the minds of various characters and depicting the complicated, often subconscious thoughts as they actually happen rather than in a logical order. This style of writing is central to much of Woolf's fiction, although it's particularly central to The Waves. The events in The Waves are told through six different characters, three men and three women, who know and interact with each other throughout their lives. Perhaps the most insightful character is Bernard, who is particularly thoughtful and prone to introspection. Neville is similarly meditative and tends to focus on beauty, a quality which ultimately leads him to become a successful poet.
Louis combines the introspective traits of the other two males with an appreciation for the practical aspects of life. Jinny, partly as a result of her defining physical beauty, is much less interested in the philosophical musings of the other characters and is much more interested in social issues. Rhoda, in contrast, is fairly anti-social and tends to be more interested in her imagination than real life. Susan also is prone to escape day-to-day events and she tends to accomplish this through venturing into nature.The events in The Waves are told through six different characters, three men and three women, who know and interact with each other throughout their lives. Perhaps the most insightful character is Bernard, who is particularly thoughtful and prone to introspection. Neville is similarly meditative and tends to focus on beauty, a quality which ultimately leads him to become a successful poet. Louis combines the introspective traits of the other two males with an appreciation for the practical aspects of life. Jinny, partly as a result of her defining physical beauty, is much less interested in the philosophical musings of the other characters and is much more interested in social issues. Rhoda, in contrast, is fairly anti-social and tends to be more interested in her imagination than real life. Susan also is prone to escape day-to-day events and she tends to accomplish this through venturing into nature. Analysis and interpretation of the motif of the waves and of nature´s role in the early lives of the characters and of the role of their friendship at Percival´s Goodbye Dinner . Originally, what later became The Waves was called The Moths. Virginia Woolf began writing it on July 2nd 1929^]. It underwent drastic changes during the writing and revising processes, that lasted until the year 1931, when it was eventually published by The Hogarth Press- the Woolf´s own publishing house. The Waves certainly and rightfully is regarded as Virginia Woolf´s most abstract and experimental, therefore least accessible novel. The ‘story’ is told through ‘dramatic soliloquies^] spoken by the six characters Rhoda, Jinny, Bernard, Susan, Neville and Louis. There is no real, direct interaction and talks between these characters, but they mean a lot to each other and bond from their common childhood onwards. A seventh character, Percival, is introduced to the reader by the monologues of the six, he never speaks for himself ,though.
The whole plot is enclosed in a scene, that can be found daily all around the world: a sunrise over the ocean and the nearby beach, as well as a garden/nature scenery. Each of these interposed chapters symbolizes a stage of life the protagonists are now at and the developments they face. The main questions I will ask and set out to answer are what the theme of waves and water are supposed to symbolize and what role nature ,ubiquitous in this novel, plays and signifies for the respective characters during their childhood. These questions appear to be central for the understanding of this piece of writing, as they do not occur in any of Woolfe´s other works I have read so far.I will also try to analyze the importance of the friends the characters have made and their feelings during the farewell dinner for Percival. Firstly, I will give a general overview about the way the novel is conceived. Secondly, I will present the main characters and their general characteristics and then give the plot of the novel. After that, I will examine the role of the waves and the beach scenery in the novel and what nature means to the individual characters and their lives. Eventually, the focus will lie on what the reunion on the occasion of Percival´s imminent departure , set years after their last encounter, means to the characters and whether time and distance have alienated them from each other and nature.I will achieve these goals by the technique of ‘close reading’, ie. the approach to this study will mainly be text-based and contrastive. The aim of this chapter is to give a brief impression about, how The Waves, is written, designed.One can find two different ways of describing the plot in the novel when examining the novel, since the interludes and the actual happenings are told through diverse techniques. Marsh, however, calls them “descriptive passages” and gives their number as nine.In the interludes, we ‘encounter’ an omniscient, impersonal narrator, that describes the actual events, e.g The sun had not yet risen. The sea was indistinguishable from the sky,except that the sea was lightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it. Gradually as the sky whitened a dark line lay on the horizon dividing the sea from the sky and the grey cloth became barred with thick strokes moving, one after another, beneath the surface, following each other, pursuing each other, perpetually. (The Waves, 3) As already briefly mentioned in the introductory chapter, the narrative used in the ´main parts´ of the novel differs quite from what is common: There is no direct discourse, no reacting on the part of the respective narrator to outward actions and stimuli. Therefore, all we find are soliloquies, that actually merely are streams of consciousness, e.g. ‘I see a ring,’ said Bernard,’ hanging above me. It quivers and hangs in a loop of light.’ ‘I see a slab of pale yellow,’ said Susan, ‘ spreading away until it meets a purple stripe.’‘I hear a sound’, said Rhoda,’cheep, chirp;cheep, chirp; going up and down’. ‘I see a globe,’said Neville,’hanging down in a drop against the enormous flanks of some hill.’ None of these ‘utterances’ is actually audible, as they only reflect what the characters would say, but think for themselves, thus becoming “silent soliloquies”. However, there seems to be a certain logic behind the pattern, after which the characters are presented. Only on the first three pages is there an order in which the characters ‘speak’, every characters ‘speaks’ once. In sections 3 and 6 one of the characters is ‘silent’. As the utterances grow in the numbers of lines they take up, the order becomes more and more arbitrary. There also appear to be dialogues on pages 7 and 8 between Louis and Jinny, and on pages 9 to 12 between Susan and Bernard. It also seems notable,that Bernard is the first as well as the last of the characters to speak. He also is the first to utter something in the sections 2,3,4,7 and 8. Affections seem to play a role in the order, in which the characters utter their monologues. According to the other characters, Susan is in love with Bernard and often speaks after him. Ranked behind them are Louis and Jinny, Neville and Rhoda. One must not forget when looking at these results, that it was Jinny who kissed Louis in the first section and that the finding, that Rhoda speaks more often after Louis,even though she is the one to speak the least, acquires a whole new meaning, considering that she later on becomes Louis´ lover.Neville, supposedly homosexual, often follows the other boys/men and for a soliloquy of Bernard a preceding Neville can be found in most cases.However, the order of appearances, arranged by the number of appearances sees Louis in front, followed by Bernard, Neville, Rhoda (surprisingly), Susan and Jinny. What is remarkable and evident at the same time, is that the girls/women speak less. This might be due to the predominant gender conception of Woolfe´s time Every character has an individual style of perception and thus varying vocabulary is used to describe his or her impressions and thoughts, especially because of the frequent repititions of images only used by the respective characters, e.g. “death among the apple trees” for Neville. The interludes are mainly dominated by vocabulary belonging to the ‘field’ of nature and man-made culture, e.g: sea, shore and leaf; blind, surface, walls.As mentioned before, the group of friends consists of seven characters, of which six directly speak to us, whilst the seventh is only portrayed by the six and therfore cannot be regarded as a ‘real’ character.This circle of friends consists of three male and female characters, their names being Bernard, Louis, Neville, Susan, Jinny and Rhoda.In this chapter I will outline some of their characteristics, without untimely giving too much of the plot away.It might seem a bit irresponsible and careless of me to use descriptions of the respective characters as children and not to give a ‘refreshed’ one for the adults they become or vice versa, but most of their character traits, problems, anxieties etc. stay the same throughout the novel or change only slightly. Thus, I concluded, this would not be worth it. Bernard is described as a poet, someone who is always in search of an apt phrase, a truly fitting description, hereby becoming a “coiner of words” (The Waves ,86) and the “blower of bubbles”.^] ( also The Waves ,86) Although nothing specific is known of his later profession, it is quite likely that he becomes poet, writer or a storyteller.Louis, suffering from a feeling of alienation throughout the novel because of his Australian origins, maintains a minority complex from childhood on, in spite of his success in life. He becomes a business man and gets wealthy. He always feels different, set apart from everyone else, but contributes to this by his own doings and feelings:If I speak, imitating their accent, they prick their ears, waiting for me to speak again, in order that they may place me-if I come from Canada or Australia, I, who desire above all things to be taken to the arms with love, am alien, external.