The most interesting part of reading To the Lighthouse for me is Virginia woolf's use of the free indirect discourse style. It comes across as experimental, but far from it being a purely formal experiment, I think she is attempting to recreate the psychology of the post-war era. Something about the Great War was extremely shattering and disintegrating, and that is just the kind of social picture that Woolf presents to us of the Ramsay family. There is no way that any of the people here can fully communicate their thoughts and feelings. This is due to some unknown social pressure that forces one to consider their words and actions from an outside perspective; I think of Lily Briscoe trying to paint but not being able to because of the "demons" that haunt her. She characterizes them as an outside force over which she has no control. This kind of anxious, paralyzed behavior is a symptom of the effects of the Great War on everyone.

Further than this, the free indirect discourse method is a literary representation of the fact that, if there existed a single, useful, cohesive worldview before the War, it has since been lost in the political and social maelstrom of the war. Woolf's characters and their thoughts are symbolic of the pure subjectiveness of the post-war world, and by this I mean the fact that each individual has to structure his/her experience of the world on their own; if there were any large institutions around before the war to assist in this construction, the air has since been sucked out of them. The Lighthouse is Virginia Woolf's representation of the confused grasping for meaning that took place among individuals after the war. But she seems to be suggesting that this process stretches back to before the war, too, since The Window takes place before the war ever happens. The free indirect discourse method is an intensely real depiction of human subjectivity, then, regardless of the time, which is why it is such an interesting take on the war.