In the first two sections of "To the Lighthouse," Virginia Woolf goes to great lengths to explore how people's perceptions shape the world. In order to achieve this, Virginia Woolf uses indirect discourse to an incredible extent, telling the entire story through the internal thoughts of the various characters. Through the various thoughts the reader is presented with, one constant emerges, and that is the ability of certain people, specifically Mrs. Ramsay, Prue Ramsay, and Andrew Ramsay. It is through the interventions of these peoples that the vacation house becomes a happy inviting place to the various characters.

However, in the novel's second part, "Time Passes," these people die for various reasons. As a result, the vacations to the house stop and the house falls into a state of disrepair. After the war however, the characters decide to return to the house and various workers have to scramble to rebuild the now disheveled house. I believe that this situation speaks a great deal to what the public must have felt after the First World War. After a devastating war that killed many of the people that made their lives worth living, the public needed to rebuild their lives and instill new meaning to their lives on their own, just as the visitors need to rebuild the Ramsay Summer house and make it a meaningful place on their own.