ative approach simply for the sake of challenging the conventional. Woolf, to the contrary, feels that her approach, or approaches, to the form of the novel and the role of narration, has more to do with human reality, with human consciousness than does the traditional form and narration. She wants to reflect in her books, or to re-create, reality as she understands it, as she experiences it.
Because Woolf has an exceptional mind, a special vision, a highly poetic and even mystical relationship with life, it is no surprise to find her books difficult at times for the reader not familiar with or not attracted to or frightened by such a special vision.
Consider this passage of a soliloquy --- over four pages long--from the character Jinny in The Waves: "Now slackness and indifference invade us. Other people brush past. We have lost consciousness of our bodies uniting under the table. I also like fair-haired men with blue eyes. The door opens. The door goes on opening. Now I think, next time it opens the whole of my life will be changed" (Woolf, Waves 104).
Woolf is offering her reality, her chosen reality, her dreamvision, to the reader as an alternative to the traditional reality. She offers a challenge not only to the traditional narrative, but to the traditional way of seeing life itself. It is a form and style which does not answer the questions raised in life in the way that traditional fiction answers questions. Life is thoroughly romantic, and is to be lived in a state of inspiration and mystical, poetic vision, according to Woolf. She disdains those who "indulge in no mystifications" (Woolf, Waves 85).
In To the Lighthouse, we find a work which is closer to the traditional narrative than The Waves, but not much closer. We find both narrative and dialogue, but, again, the work invites us into not a traditional but a special world. As Eudora Welty writes in her Foreword to the novel, "In the 'Ti
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