Many writers are resistant to labels in literary history. Mallarme, for example, resented being called a symbolic poet, and Marquez denied that his work was magical realism. Still, these labels have a very direct impact on the reader. For example, for a long time, I was put off by Woolf because of the concepts of "stream of consciousness" and "feminism."

After reading To the Lighthouse, I found that Woolf's novel is more distinctively characteristic than can be summed up by these two labels. Really good work is like this, with a natural ability to resist any label.

The story is simple enough to be summed up in one sentence: Mr. And Mrs. Ramsay, their eight children, and two guest couples plan a trip to their summer residence on an island with a lighthouse, but the weather poses problems. More than a decade later, some of these people have died, some of their marriages have failed, and the few who remain have reunited and ended up at the lighthouse. Such a plot makes many readers shrink away and fall asleep, but Woolf creates a poetic world parallel to the real world through delicate, rich and accurate psychological descriptions, and immerses herself in it with unprecedented aesthetic pleasure. One critic even noted that "to read any ordinary novel after To the Lighthouse is to feel as if you are leaving the light of day and entering the world of puppets and cardboard."

Sometimes I think that a lot of what seems to be the avant-garde of 20th-century literature may have come about by necessity. This is so because, in my opinion, the core of literature is "originality", and in the face of the vast number of works written in the history of literature, who has the confidence to write a story that is completely new in terms of plot? As a reader, why should I read a story that has been told by countless others? William Golding said, "There is no point in writing a novel unless you are doing something you doubt you can do, or you are sure that no one else has tried. It is useless to write two books alike." That's what I'm trying to say.

All kinds of avant-garde writing are easy to "doctrine" at first, and allow the reader to absorb the sincerity of the author. It is actually a more difficult way of writing than traditional realistic fiction. In To the Lighthouse, Woolf infuses her childhood recollections, memories of her parents' personalities, and her own inner experiences into the characters. I think this prevents the novel from becoming an "aerial" work to a certain extent. That is to say, I am conservative in my belief that the real-life experience is the necessary literary element, and it is in this sense that the (post) modernist novel does not completely break away from the traditional novel.

Nonetheless, while reading To the Lighthouse, I saw not literary genres but individuals. I realized that the inner monologue was well suited to the expression of human loneliness -- loneliness and the resistance to loneliness were what impressed me most about the novel.

Almost everyone in the novel has a great deal of emotional unrest, spiraling up and down with a word, a picture, a flicker of movement. What they actually say, however, only amounts to bits and pieces of the real dialogue, often with little meaning. The conversations between husband and wife, between parents and children, and between lovers all seemed to come to the ears only with an unintelligible hum of noise as if they were all carefully hidden behind their armor to avoid bringing harm. There are two obvious disclosures of this brutal truth in the novel. One is at the dinner party:

All who bent themselves to listen to thought, “Pray heaven that the inside of my mind may not be exposed.” (P77)

They all listened, and said to themselves, "May God not let what is in my heart come out." (P114)

In another place, through the words of Lily, the painter, the narrator ponders in his heart:

“The urgency of the moment always missed its mark. Words fluttered sideways and struck the object inches too low. The one gave it up; then the idea sunk back again, the one became like most middle-aged people, cautious, furtive, With the wrinkles between the eyes and a look of perpetual apprehension. For how could one express in words these emotions of the body? General express that emptiness there?” (P146)

Momentary urgency is always hard to pinpoint. The speech missed repeatedly, missing the target by several inches. “So you give up; The unspoken thought sinks back into the heart. So you are like most middle-aged people, cautious and hesitant, with wrinkles between the eyes and an expression of great understanding. How can one put into words the feelings of the body, the emptiness there?” (P218)

These descriptions remind me of an entry in Kafka's diary: "I write differently than I talk, I talk differently than I think, I think differently than I should think, and so on until I enter the deepest darkness."

Indeed, if we use "what we mean" as the moral standard to measure our words and deeds in daily life, we will only look into a deep darkness.