When I first read To the Lighthouse last summer, I did not read World War I into it at all.  In fact, I thought of this novel as a sort of eulogy for traditional marriage as we see with Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay and their horde of children.  While I think that reading is still justified, with the context of this course I began to read WWI as a pervasive subtext to the novel.  Mrs. Ramsay's insistence on creating marriages is less an overbearing, motherly figure, but instead someone who wishes to see the world repopulated following a war that decimated the younger population like none other before it.  Mr. Ramsay has similar feelings that his children "must be filled with life." (37)  This insistence on "must" is important because it is declarative and insinuates that any other option would not be acceptable.  Mr. Ramsay, according to Mrs. Ramsay, sees the world differently and appears deeply appreciative of the life that surrounds him, but some part of him still cannot actually see the beauty of things (flowers, landscapes, his own daughter's beauty are just a few examples).  This also accounts perhaps for the general feeling of boredom that everyone feels.  As if something big is always just about to happen, and the endless waiting for whatever that event might be is exhausting.  It accounts for Charles Tansley's nihilism, that the Ramsey children misidentify as atheism.  The War might even account for some part of Augustsus Carmichael's opium abuse.  In many ways, To the Lighthouse can then be read as a portrait of how domestic lives attempt to account for trauma and how the mundaneness of it all comes up lacking in the wake of an event as devastating as the War.