Virginia's Woolf's book To the Lighthouse is a comlex book dealing with many themes.  One is the passage of time shown by the waves hitting the shoreline, and the two main characters. Mr. Ramsay stares at the waves in the first part of the book, "The Window".  He is preoccupied by his death (not in the physical sense, but that of his talent and never having become the great man he thought he should have become.  Yet he is able to make peace with the demise of his expectations when he realizes that he will have immortality of another sort with his family.  Mrs. Ramsay's gazing at the same scene with the waves has more prosaic thoughts, but just as intense.  She centers upon the children (ie James) and wonders what they will become as adults.  She knows that life will change and no one can protect them from the dangers of life and of the uncertain future.  However Mrs. Ramsay also bears the brunt (as many women did) of being the caretaker physically and emotionally of the family but also of her husband.  This is a theme that the author touches on in many of her novels and also laments that women cannot produce something great as they never have any time to themselves.  Lily is able to speak the thoughts Mrs. Ramsay cannot thanks to the authors technique in 'direct discourse'of all the other characters. "He wears Mrs. Ramsay to death".  Lily is also able to reflect on the theme that human relations between men and women are not only unequal but can be the worst type.  'The Window' can also reflect on the window of the soul or the thoughts of all characters in this panoramic vision.

In 'Time passes' the author still uses the technique of the characters' random thoughts with each musing about the war and of the changes of the family at this beach house.  It is now tem years later and Lily has come back to finish the portrait of Mrs. Ramsay (now dead) as are two of her children-one from the war, but one from the more prosaic tragedies in life as Prue died in childbirth.  The war has changed all the people, and they remain incomplete puzzles of shells, each with their own private grief.  In many ways, their reality is the same as the characters of another war writer, Satre whose characters would claim that "hell is other people".  Virgina Woolf's novels are more lightly done, the characters don't scream and rant, but their despair is as heavy as Hemmingway's characters in their empty lives wasted in bars.