Abstract

For Virginia Woolf, the task of the novelist was to convey the nature of consciousness by recording the "atoms as they fall upon the mind." Her fascination with the workings of the mind itself and her belief that writing was a transcription of existence makes her work accessible to a phenomenological investigation. Using Edmund Husserl's doctrine of intentionality, which presupposes an intentional structure of consciousness as a link to the world, and Henri Bergson's notion of consciousness as duration where phases of time interpenetrate, an exploration of Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and Between the Acts is provided. Both philosophers see the self as relational, as coming to be in the flow of mental time, and Woolf's depiction in character representation presents the self as a stream of temporal relations: past, present, and future. ;Since it is argued that time constitutes self in Woolf's work, Bergson and Georges Poulet offer crucial insight into the role of memory and imagination in moments of consciousness for her characters, particularly in moments of being. Woolf's moment of being, a convergence of past and present emotions and perceptions, creates the experience of eternity, and Karl Jaspers' thought provides philosophical grounding for this experience. Poulet augments the discussion by furnishing an understanding for the self-coherence achieved in the midst of the flux of consciousness. ;Borrowing from Paul Ricoeur, analysis is made of the tension between inner time consciousness and objective time. It is noted that the achievement of selfhood entails the integration of these two times, and using the concept of intersubjectivity developed by Schutz and Gurwitsch, further conditions for selfhood are presented. In each novel different character/selves embody either inner time or objective time. Connected by the narrator, these oppositions and their mutuality form one of the many patterns of coexisting contraries: intuition and fact, near and far, art and life, land and sea. ;Finally, this text argues that narrative is an essential feature of human reality and that unification of the self in phenomenological understanding and in Woolf's characters occurs in the telling of the self's story. The characters tell and listen to their own stories in order to withstand and overcome mutability. Orchestrating these individual tellings is the central mind who makes a pattern of these tales of time, indicating with the author, the complex nature of reality. In Between the Acts, this telling of stories culminates in a communal narrative. Woolf abandons the "I" for the "we," the individual moment of being for one of human communion, the self for community, and individual story for communal and historical narrative