In Virginia Woolf 's To the Lighthouse (1927), Lily Briscoe voices the modernist pursuit of unity as a desire for intimacy, for personal knowledge of Mrs. Ramsay: “What device [was there] for becoming, like waters poured into one jar, inextricably the same, one with the object one adored? … How… did one know one thing or another thing about people, sealed as they were?” (TTL 54). Lily's problem is a phenomenological one: as a conscious self, she yearns for access to the internal consciousness of an external other. However, the thoughts and emotions of an individually conscious subject belong exclusively to her own interiority, as Mrs. Ramsay thinks to herself, “she alone could search into her [own] mind and heart” (66). In order to overcome the alienation of privacy, Lily desires to share interiority, but Woolf consistently evinces the impossibility of communicating the intimate knowledge of the mind, what she describes as “nothing that could be written in any language known to men” (54). Instead of actually experiencing the same interior thoughts as an other, or attempting to encode one's experience and recreate it in an other's consciousness via language, the individual creates an illusory yet functional communion with others through the perception of mutually exterior objects.

At stake here is our understanding of intersubjectivity, of the experience of being a conscious subject among other selves. Justine Dymond asserts that Woolf 's narrative project “explores orientation toward the other as constitutive of a fl uid subjectivity, therefore putting into question what constitutes the boundary between the subject and the other” (140–41). For Dymond, Woolf 's writing not only expresses a desire for one self to know another but also enacts a successful communion of their subjectivities. However, though free indirect discourse allows the narration to vacillate between consciousnesses of characters, thereby weaving together the perspectives of different selves into a fabric—that is, the novel—this fabric is visible only to the reader. The individual threads of thought remain separate for the subjects to which they belong.