ine.'*'But it may be fine - I expect it will be fine,' said Mrs Ramsay . . .'It's due west,' said the atheist Tansley . . .'Nonsense,' said Mrs Ramsay . . . *'There'll be no landing at the Lighthouse to-morrow,' said Charles Tansley . . . 'Would it bore you to come with me, Mrs Tansley?''Let us all go!' she cried . . . 'Let's go,' he said.'Good-bye, Elsie,' she said. (pp.3-16)Inconsequent voices demur about the weather: typical English conversation implying an apathetic form of communion, signifying little - so we might assess this dialogue if it were presented to us as I have transcribed it, dissecting it from its root-network in the complex matrix of the narrative voice which recounts the soliloquies of the persons from whom these extracts of conversation are gathered. The dominant mode of To the Lighthouse is multiple impersonation of soliloquies. Indeed, the contribution of James in this first section, though fierce and uproarious (he would like to murder his father for saying no to the lighthouse) is wholly soliloquy, suppressed into direct narrative as a child's impulses seethe unvented beneath the pressure of adult omnipotence. It is the narrator's painstaking saying of the unsaid, disclosing the continuum of thoughts which motivate, that infuses the trivial conversation with a quality of tense urgency.The voices, in the context of the underlying soliloquy which is the book's dominant mode, seem choric, especially when the emotion and significance that these prosaic words carry is taken into account. In Mr Ramsay's 'But', detached from the rest of his remark ('it won't be fine') by the grammatical form of the sentence, lies all the crushing weight of paternal reason that ever went into crushing a boy's hopes; in his mother's optimistic prevarication ('But it may be fine - I expect it will be fine') is the mediatorial sympathy that filmed the childish eye with a protective membrane like 'a very thine yellow veil . . . like a vine ...
