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Get every literary device explanation for To the LighthousePlus so much more...
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Imagery
Explanation and Analysis—The Murmur of the Sea:
In "Time Passes," the middle portion of To the Lighthouse, the timescale of the novel abruptly zooms out from the thought-to-thought stream of "The Window" to a grand, practically geologic, scale. The narrator meditates on the environment throughout this section, and how it varyingly changes and remains constant amid the passage of time. In Chapter 10 of "Time Passes," Woolf uses sound imagery and personification to characterize the sea after the conclusion of World War I:
Then indeed peace had come. Messages of peace breathed from the sea to the shore. Never to break its sleep any more, to lull it rather more deeply to rest and whatever the dreamers dreamt holily, dreamt wisely to confirm — what else was it murmuring — as Lily Briscoe laid her head on the pillow in the clean still room and heard the sea. Through the open window the voice of the beauty of the world came murmuring, too softly to hear exactly what it said — but what mattered if the meaning were plain?
Through the auditory imagery of a murmur to characterize the ocean waves and their gentle crashing sound, the sea is personified into a sort of soothsayer who carries the "voice of the beauty of the world" and speaks to Lily Briscoe as she falls asleep. This voice carries "messages of peace," of the end of the war, from the sea to the shore. Though the sea is at times sinister and threatening in the novel, here it is a gentle and calming constant in the background of the island setting—communicating indistinctly, but nonetheless spreading calm over the world.
Although the sea tends to be indifferent toward the human world in To the Lighthouse, in "Time Passes," as the narrator shifts focus toward the environment and away from the individual lives of the Ramsays and their friends, the environment gains human traits through personification. Here, the sea is very much a character, and even a healer, bringing peace as the world begins to recover from the horrors of World War I.
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