The novel opens with Mr. Ramsay dashing his son James's hopes to sail to the lighthouse off the coast of Skye. Ramsay's negativity elicits no small amount of rage from James, as a sinister simile illustrates in Chapter 1 of "The Window":
Had there been an axe handy, a poker, or any weapon that would have gashed a hole in his father's breast and killed him, there and then, James would have seized it. Such were the extremes of emotion that Mr. Ramsay excited in his children's breasts by his mere presence; standing, as now, lean as a knife, narrow as the blade of one...
In this passage, Woolf complements James's frightening reaction to his father—in which James expresses that he would kill him, if only he had a weapon to do so—with a simile that compares Ramsay himself to a murder weapon of his own. Ramsay is like a knife, as severe and imposing as a knife-blade, and with a similar cruelty: he seems to take pleasure in rebuking his son and grins "sarcastically" with "the pleasure of disillusioning his son and casting ridicule upon his wife."
Mr. Ramsay has a certain physical and emotional severity in the novel, and throughout the story he takes this out on his family around him. In just the first few pages, this simile establishes this capacity: as a man who has a certain violence about him, he has the very appearance of a weapon. This is the essence of Mr. Ramsay's masculinity—later, Woolf even characterizes an interaction between Ramsay and Mrs. Ramsay in terms of an axe trying to fell a tree—and it's a prime example of how Woolf explores and characterizes gendered identity in the novel.
The sea is a recurring symbol in To the Lighthouse, and a recurring motif that establishes this symbol is the waves on the shore of Skye. Woolf frequently invokes waves as comparands in metaphor and simile, as in Chapter 3 of "The Window":
...the monotonous fall of the waves on the beach, which for the most part beat a measured and soothing tattoo to her thoughts and seemed consolingly to repeat over and over again as she sat with the children the words of some old cradle song, murmured by nature, 'I am guarding you - I am your support,' but at other times suddenly and unexpectedly, especially when her mind raised itself slightly from the task actually in hand, had no such kindly meaning, but like a ghostly roll of drums remorselessly beat the measure of life...
Here, waves are a measure of time, a guaranteed rhythm, the passing of which is at times soothing and at times sinister; the sound of the waves on the shore will never cease. As is the case in many of Woolf's metaphors, this passage morphs into a reflection on the meaning of life itself: how must we live when the constant ticking of time is simultaneously reassuring and mortally terrifying?
In Chapter 9 of "The Window," Woolf changes the comparative power of waves to represent the assemblage of an entire life from discrete moments:
And what was even more exciting, she felt... how life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach.
In this simile, Lily Briscoe compares her movement through life, moment to moment, to the way that a wave assembles itself from the sea and carries one onto the shore. As Lily feels it, the meaning of life—the shape of this wave—is inextricable from the individual moments of time. In fact, the little incidents are the very things that give the wave its shape. This metaphor illustrates a central theme in To the Lighthouse: one's experience of time directly effects one's sense of purpose and one's understanding of life's meaning.
In To the Lighthouse, Mr. Ramsay constantly seeks praise and sympathy from the women in his life—particularly from Mrs. Ramsay, while she is alive. In Chapter 7 of "The Window," the reader sees James's experience of his father's neediness through both metaphor and simile:
...and James, as he stood stiff between her knees, felt her rise in a rosy-flowered fruit tree laid with leaves and dancing boughs into which the beak of brass, the arid scimitar of his father, the egotistical man, plunged and smote, demanding sympathy. Filled with her words, like a child who drops off satisfied, he said, at last, looking at her with humble gratitude, restored, renewed, that he would take a turn; he would watch the children playing cricket.
Woolf transforms Mrs. Ramsay into a brilliantly flowered tree and Mr. Ramsay into an arid scimitar, a blade that strikes into the wood. This is James's violent interpretation of his parents in a moment of tension, as Mr. Ramsay tries to get what sympathy he can from his wife. The metaphor sharply contrasts Mr. Ramsay's brutality with Mrs. Ramsay's stoic beauty, until—when Mr. Ramsay is content and relents—Woolf shifts to a breast-feeding simile: like a child who drops off satisfied, he draws back.
Much of To the Lighthouse explores gender roles in the novel's early 20th-century setting. Here, metaphor and simile come together to characterize the gender dynamics of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay's relationship: first in terms of violence, as Mr. Ramsay's insecure masculinity transforms into a weapon that seeks to fell Mrs. Ramsay's stately flowering tree. Second, in terms of motherhood and nurturing, as Mrs. Ramsay provides her husband with the sympathy he craves and enables him to relax once more. These characterizations also reverse the traditional depictions of heterosexual relationships, in which the man is stoic and the woman needy, to cast Mrs. Ramsay as a constant and stable source of power in her relationship. These literary devices emphasize this immense power, rather than make Mrs. Ramsay out to be a victim of her husband's insecurities: a great tree in bloom, standing strong against an attack, and a great mother, protecting and feeding her family.
The sea is a recurring symbol in To the Lighthouse, and a recurring motif that establishes this symbol is the waves on the shore of Skye. Woolf frequently invokes waves as comparands in metaphor and simile, as in Chapter 3 of "The Window":
...the monotonous fall of the waves on the beach, which for the most part beat a measured and soothing tattoo to her thoughts and seemed consolingly to repeat over and over again as she sat with the children the words of some old cradle song, murmured by nature, 'I am guarding you - I am your support,' but at other times suddenly and unexpectedly, especially when her mind raised itself slightly from the task actually in hand, had no such kindly meaning, but like a ghostly roll of drums remorselessly beat the measure of life...
Here, waves are a measure of time, a guaranteed rhythm, the passing of which is at times soothing and at times sinister; the sound of the waves on the shore will never cease. As is the case in many of Woolf's metaphors, this passage morphs into a reflection on the meaning of life itself: how must we live when the constant ticking of time is simultaneously reassuring and mortally terrifying?
In Chapter 9 of "The Window," Woolf changes the comparative power of waves to represent the assemblage of an entire life from discrete moments:
And what was even more exciting, she felt... how life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach.
In this simile, Lily Briscoe compares her movement through life, moment to moment, to the way that a wave assembles itself from the sea and carries one onto the shore. As Lily feels it, the meaning of life—the shape of this wave—is inextricable from the individual moments of time. In fact, the little incidents are the very things that give the wave its shape. This metaphor illustrates a central theme in To the Lighthouse: one's experience of time directly effects one's sense of purpose and one's understanding of life's meaning.
Tasked with painting a portrait of Mrs. Ramsay, Lily Briscoe spends the bulk of To the Lighthouse transfixed by her subject. In Chapter 9 of "The Window," Lily remembers a conversation with Mrs. Ramsay the evening prior, and her memory of the conversation includes a simile:
Sitting on the floor with her arms round Mrs. Ramsay's knees, close as she could get, smiling to think that Mrs. Ramsay would never know the reason of that pressure, she imagined how in the chambers the mind and heart of the woman who was, physically, touching her, were stood, like the treasures in the tombs of kings, tablets bearing sacred inscriptions, which if one could spell them out would teach one everything, but they would never be offered openly, never made public.
In To the Lighthouse, Woolf explores the frustrating experience of living only in one's own body while constantly trying to understand what life would be like in the minds and bodies of other people. This is especially frustrating to anyone who strives to be an artist and therefore builds their very life around knowing and depicting people.
In this passage, Lily Briscoe uses a powerful simile to express this frustration—the unknowability of Mrs. Ramsay's inner life is compared to the sacred treasures hidden in an ancient tomb that have been lost to time. As Mrs. Ramsay's portrait painter, Lily becomes a sort of archaeologist: she must bring to bear, somehow, the complex reaches of Mrs. Ramsay's personhood onto her canvas.
The unknowable and beguiling nature of interior life is a major theme in To the Lighthouse, and the generative struggle to understand human thought and emotion from the inside is played out throughout the entire novel as Woolf moves between each character's innermost thoughts.
In "Time Passes," the Ramsay family moves out of their summer house on Skye and remains away for a decade. During this period, the house begins to take on a life of its own as it begins to rot and crumble from neglect. The book recounts this transformation using both alliteration and simile at the very beginning of Chapter 9:
The house was left; the house was deserted. It was left like a shell on a sandhill to fill with dry salt grains now that life had left it. The long night seemed to have set in, the trifling airs, nibbling, the clammy breaths, fumbling, seemed to have triumphed. The saucepan had rusted and the mat decayed. Toads had nosed their way in. Idly, aimlessly, the swing shawl swung to and fro. A thistle thrust itself between the tiles in the larder.
Woolf makes ample use of literary devices in this passage to paint a vivid picture of this scene. She begins with a simile, comparing the house to a seashell on a dune, abandoned by whatever organisms once lived within and filling with sand as time goes on. Woolf then illustrates what, exactly, these new tenants are that fill the house: "trifling" gusts of wind, some "toads," even some plants begin to grow in the larder. She uses alliteration to illustrate her observations: the "swing shawl swung," while "a thistle thrust itself between the tiles."
In the first part of the passage, the seashell simile captures the barrenness of the house on Skye, a barrenness that stands in sharp contrast to the lively environment of the first section of the book, "The Window," when the house was filled with people. The purpose of a seashell is to be a home for a sea creature, and an empty shell on the shore is a physical reminder of death and abandonment.
After characterizing the emptiness of the Ramsay's house in these terms, Woolf then shifts the reader's attention to time in the second part of the paragraph through the use of alliteration. By repeating these sounds, Woolf calls attention to the passage of the words themselves before the readers eyes: physical evidence of the passage of time. She builds a metronome out of the sentences that ticks away as the words march on, and thereby emphasizes the dramatic acceleration of the novel's time-scale in "Time Passes." Her description of the house's deterioration captures months and years of neglect in mere seconds, metered out by the alliteration itself.
In Chapter 9 of "The Lighthouse," at the very end of the novel, Lily sees that the Ramsays have, at long last, made it to the lighthouse island. As she stands with Mr. Carmichael looking out to sea, the narrator uses a simile to depict the aging poet:
'He has landed,' she said aloud. 'It is finished.' Then, surging up, puffing slightly, old Mr. Carmichael stood beside her, looking like an old pagan God, shaggy, with weeds in his hair and the trident (it was only a French novel) in his hand. He stood by her on the edge of the lawn, swaying a little in his bulk, and said, shading his eyes with his hand: 'They will have landed,' and she felt that she had been right.
The narrator compares Mr. Carmichael to "an old pagan God," who, with seaweed in his hair and carrying a trident, sounds a lot like Poseidon or some other archaic sea deity. This is a fitting comparison to make, given that Lily and Carmichael have been literally "watching over" the sea voyage of the Ramsays, and is just one in a slew of references to classical gods and myth that Woolf weaves in throughout To the Lighthouse. As Carmichael is a poet, there is a sense of immortality about him: though he may perish, his poems may linger.
