Spanning the the course of WWI, to the lost generation. In this sense, it is a quintessential modernist novel. However. I do not care for Woolf or her writing. I like modernism when it provides a smokescreen for drama unfolding in the periphery / outside to FOV which is restricted by the stream of consciousness characters. Woolf (on purpose, not for lack of skill, mind you) does not demonstrate as much ambition as Faulkner in the plots she depicts in her modernist novels. This book is much more similar to e.g. Ulysses, but obviously doesn't hold a flame to that book because nothing can, and so instead it's kind of just people going about their days, quibbling, and musing. It's a story about the passage of time and being swallowed up by it – not going for the traumatic generational trauma packed into The Sound and the Fury.

I - The Window

• Mr. Ramsay is a philosopher and kind of a dick.
• Mrs. Ramsay contains multitudes
• Together they have too many kids to list (8)

Of consequence in this part is James, who wants to go to the lighthouse, as encouraged by his mother, but is rebuffed by his father because the weather keeps being bad.

The story swirls between a handful of characters including the Ramsays, some of their children, as well as their guests e.g. the painter Lily Briscoe, who struggles to paint a picture of Mrs. Ramsay and serves as an entrypoint into discussion of the station of womanhood and Charles Tansley who is a shill for Mr. Ramsay. Lily begins her painting, Mrs. Ramsay soothes the resentful James, and Mr. Ramsay frets over his shortcomings as a philosopher, periodically turning to Mrs. Ramsay for comfort.

This part begins to center around the tensions between all the personalities which comes to a head at the dinner party (Woolf loooooves a dinner party). Trying to impress Mr. Ramsay, Tansley suggests that women are incapable of artistry (writing or painting). Mr Ramsay has his head too far up his ass to come to the defense of his other guest and instead is busy stewing over the poet Augustus Carmichael's fatass wanting a second serving of soup. After everyone leaves in surprising manageable spirits, the Ramsays keep each other company which consists of Mr. Ramsay fishing for reassurances that his wife loves him. It's an asymmetric phrase for them, which bothers him.

II - Time Passes

Ten years pass quickly, marked by war, the sudden death of Mrs. Ramsay, and the deaths of two children, Prue and Andrew. The summer house falls into disrepair.

Carmichael believes that, pretty much, if nothing else, WWI was great for poetry!!

III - The Lighthouse

Years later, Mr. Ramsay finally takes his now-teenage children, James and Cam, to the lighthouse. While they go, Lily returns to finish her painting, finally achieving a sense of artistic vision and harmony just as the boat arrives.

On the ferry boat to the lighthouse, Ramsay entreats Lily for the same quality of comfort he enjoyed from the reassuring-in-her-own-way Mrs. Ramsay, but she is not her. His children are embarrassed by his behavior. The debacle about carrot-on-a-stick'ing James with the lighthouse in Part I have, by now, blossomed into teenage paternal resentment. Lily (Woolf stand-in) finishes the painting with a deft stroke indicating her satisfaction with her work which women aren't supposed to even be capable of doing!

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