Importance of Brackets in Virginia Woolfs To The Lighthouse Essay

Importance of Brackets in To The Lighthouse Here Mr. Carmichael, who was reading Virgil, blew out his candle. It was midnight. Mr. Ramsay, stumbling along a passage integrity dark morning, stretched his arms out, but Mrs. Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night before, his arms, though stretched out, remained empty. Prue Ramsay died that summer in some illness connected with childbirth, which was indeed a tragedy, heap said, everything, they said, had promised so well. A shell exploded. Twenty or thirty young men were blown up in France, among them Andrew Ramsay, whose death, mercifully, was instantaneous. Mr. Carmichael brought out a volume of poems that spring, which had an unexpected success. The war, the great unwashed said, had revived their interest in poetry. The text from To The Lighthouse, quoted above, is the sum total of all bracketed asides that appear in the novels second section, Time Passes. The compelling question is, why were brackets chosen to e mphasize this particular information, and how do the bracketed sections fit in with the rest of the section? Obviously, one purpose of the brackets is to convey personal information about the family in the middle of a narrative dedicated to the empty summer house. Death of a family member occurs in three out of the five sets. This is an effective plot thingamajig to fast-forward time and to age the surviving characters. But Woolfs text is not heavily burdened with plot devices, generally. Her prose is whittled to its b atomic number 18 essence. So the brackets must mean more than self-aware literary trickery. The first and fifth bracket sets are like bookends, both about Mr. Carmichael. In the first, the information about him blo... ...e powerful when read in the center of the rest of the text, the story of a dying family, a deteriorating house, a falling away of the light from the lighthouse. They also remind the reader that life and death experience beyond plac es of sentimental houses. The brackets themselves add an emphasis beyond what is possible with a parentheses. Are they as strong as a voice-over would be in a movie? I dont think so. Rather, I imagine them as dialogue, spoken in the voices of children, neighbors, and documents, background noise that add to the overall effect but are only a tiny portion of the text that surrounds them. Works Cited and Consulted Latham, Jacqueline, ed. Critics on Virginia Woolf. Florida University of Miami Press, 1970. Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. Introduction by D.M. Hoare, Ph.D. London J.M. Dent and Sons Ltd., 1960