From the invisible to the visible is only a step, and a very quick one at that. The task of metaphor is to make concrete and palpable, by analogy, the abstract and the invisible, and the peppers of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, in particular the dinner episode of the largely interior "moments of being", with a muscular metaphor and a sinuous simile. Two artists here work with metaphor to unite the divided guests: Ms. Ramsay, a social artist whose conversational gifts connect people through shared language, and Lily Briscoe, whose talent as a painter translates into a gift for a visual window imaginatively on the minds of others. . For Ms. Ramsay, metaphor resides in the oral present as a vanishing bridge between people. His unrecordable art (except by Woolf's pen) may not last, but it is still necessary. Lily's metaphor is also an instant leap, but her analogies freeze moments in a timeless way. Metaphor is a present action abstracted from temporal boundaries. Woolf's strategy of indirect speech extends Lily's artistic talent and facilitates heteroglot fusion; the voices internal to the present become timeless and abstract thanks to their confluence in the narrative pool. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why violent video games should not be banned”? Get an original essay The dinner table is an undulating arrangement of voices, from Person A's external and internal thought to Person A's speech directed towards person B to person B's thought to person B's speech to person C and a perfect forum to highlight the problems and potential solutions of social disharmony. In the first of many water-related images, Ms. Ramsay laments the fractured, hidden transitions that dominate the table: “They were all seated separately. And all the effort of fusion, fluidity and creation rested on it” (83). But Mrs. Ramsay, too, fails to merge, circulate and create within herself. She observes the gap between “what she thought” and “what she did” (83). Yet her metaphors remain in a solipsistic world of language and images, rarely bridging the gap between herself and the other. When the opportunity presents itself to connect with someone else through metaphor, she comes back to herself, as when she sympathizes with William Bankes: [And] out of pity for him, the life being now strong enough to support her again, she began this whole affair, as a sailor, not without weariness, sees the wind filling his sail and yet he hardly wants to go back and wonders how, if the ship had sunk, it would have spun in circles and found rest on the sea floor. (84) The solipsistic imagery continues in this double metaphor (or hypothetical image in a simile); Mrs. Ramsay first imagines herself as a sailor, then the sailor (“he”) imagines himself in a fatal vortex. The metaphor is fueled by the movement in the present tense of its image; the sailor is caught between the tired expectation of his voyage and the melancholic desire to die through the conditional past. Ramsay's artistry is useful in combination with Lily's metaphors, however. Lily describes moments in her life as “illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the darkness” (161). The essence of the metaphor is captured here by instant visibility. Her visual abilities suit the metaphor/moment of being: “In a flash, she saw her photo” (84). Lily's metaphors are external to herself and allow us to empathize with others, as when she makes the comparison of Mrs. Ramsay's sailor: "Lily Briscoe thewatched it drift... as one follows a disappearing ship until the sails sink below the horizon” (84). Despite Lily's observant and empathetic eye, she does not have the same presence as Mrs. Ramsay and cannot produce the same physical effects that she can. Mikhail Bakhtin, explaining Lessing, describes the temporality of the literary image: "Things that are static in space cannot be described statically, but rather must be incorporated into the temporal sequence of the depicted events and into the proper field representation of history. » In this sense, Lily's metaphors, however dynamic and sympathetic they may be, remain static and are incorporated into the temporal sequence of the scene through Mrs. Ramsay, the conversational intermediary of Lily's metaphorical mentality. From the chaos around the dinner table, Lily creates a mental and visual order, while Mrs. Ramsay creates a social and linguistic order "speaking French imposes a certain order, a certain uniformity" (90). Which further differentiates Lily's metaphors from those of Mrs. According to Ramsay, those of the former clarify and illuminate the scene instead of simply ordering it. This ability to lay bare what was previously invisible is summed up in her assessment of Tansley: “Sitting across from him, she couldn't see, like in an x-ray. photograph, the ribs and femurs of the young man's desire to be impressed, dark in the mist of his flesh” (91). Water is used in the image again, but this time, in the form of mist, which recreates the haze of X-rays. But the mist, although limited to a still photograph, has a story and a movement , just as mist is metamorphic, transitional, moving from liquid to air. Her temporally inclusive view allows for a certain empathy that she would not otherwise have for the arrogant Tansley. “[I]t was almost impossible to hate someone if you looked at them” (85). indirect speech articulates for them and allows for sympathy and emotion without direct words. From Mrs. Ramsay's point of view, supposedly, of the fighting birds, we are told that "the air was repelled by their black wings and cut into exquisite scimitar shapes." The movement of the wings beating, out, out, which she could never describe with enough precision to please herself, was one of the most beautiful of all for her” (80). Mrs. Ramsay's proclamation of inarticulacy is countered by the image of "scimitar shapes" that the narrator conjures up, which seems to fuel Mrs. Ramsay's emotions. Or perhaps the conjurer is not just the narrator : “Look at this,” she said to Rose, hoping that Rose would see it more clearly than she could. For children so often gave a little nudge to our own perceptions” (80). The linguistic transmission (Rose probably does not know the word "scimitar", but perhaps her image of birds as swords led to the narrative description) from the inarticulate to the articulate by means of metaphor is captured by another comparison for Mrs. Ramsay: “[Like a queen who, finding her people gathered in the hall, despises them... she went down and passed through the hall. and bowed her head ever so slightly, as if accepting what they could not say: their homage to her beauty” (82). This vocalization can only be done by comparison (and here by another type of image, beauty) favors comparison as the essential component of language, that which gives a vibrant voice to deaf thought. Additionally, indirect speech can demonstrate mental and linguistic differences in much more subtle ways than outright perspective shifts. At first glance, Tansley and Lily's thought progressions appear similar. The thought ofTansley unfolds in semicolon steps: “He liked her; he admired him; he still thought of the man in the drain looking at her; but he felt the need to assert himself” (86). The initial statement, the precise revision, the use of evidence, and the conclusion, all the structures of rigorous logic are present. In the next paragraph, Lily responds by thinking in similar steps, although separated by commas and directed toward the body: "He really was, Lily Briscoe thought, despite his eyes, but then look at his nose, look at his hands, the most uncharming human being she had ever met” (86). Yet the thought is not as unified (in a reductive sense) as Tansley's. The elliptical framing of the thought "He really was...the least charming human being" has a delayed resonance that transforms the progression of the idea from a scientific idea (the constant accumulation of facts into an indisputable thesis) to an artistic idea (the recognition of contradictory emotional facts that leads to a somewhat ambiguous conclusion, structurally linked to the origin). Lily shifts to a more poetic form soon after, and the separation between her and Tansley's thoughts is evident: "Why did his whole being bend, like corn in the wind, and recovered from this degradation only at the cost of a great and rather painful effort? ?" (86) The comparison of passivity and the stereotypically masculine verb "erect" collide; this forces Lily to then return to Tansley's thought: "She has to take him up one more time. There's the strand on the tablecloth there is my painting; I must move the tree in the middle; it does not matter” (86). reductive masculine of necessity and affirmation ("necessary to assert oneself"/"it doesn't matter") by Tansley's resonant taunt, "Women can" "I can't write, women can't don't know how to paint” (86) When Lily's ambiguous judgment; two paragraphs later, the sentence “She told lies that he could see” (86) is made indirect by the absence of a comma. Rephrased with a comma as "She told lies, he could see", the sentence is from Tansley's point of view, separating thought ("She told lies") from action ("he could see"). Read without the comma in a different way, the sentence is "She told lies that he could see", implying that Lily was directing the action (lying is action rather than thought) and therefore , the story. . Moreover, the latter point of view could be the omniscient narrative point of view. Regardless, the narrative returns to Tansley's voice with "He felt very rough, isolated and alone" (86), but this infiltrating narrative control of Lily infects him and he begins to learn or feel this what others think: “[I]f he despised him: Prue Ramsay too; they all despised him” (86). Although this sense of community is clearly not positive, at least Tansley moves away from invulnerable selfishness. In a scene dominated by surveillance and the emotional access this provides "(they looked at each other around the long table sending these questions and answers across, each knowing exactly what the other felt)" (96) the lighting the candles seems to symbolize the benefits of the metaphor: Now all the candles were lit, and the faces on both sides of the table came closer in the candlelight. , and as they had not been at dusk, they.