Perhaps we should explore this isolation theme a bit more. I mentioned the window as an important part of the novel. The window sets up limitations of perception. Lily looks into the window and sees Mrs. Ramsey reading to James. But that is such a small view. Notice the limitation. When we look inside a window from out side, all we see is a small fraction of what is inside the house. We just catch an image but a life is within which we are not privey to. This parallels our understanding of people. All we see is a glance, but we don't know them really, even our closest relatives. Isolation is in part because of the inability to reach into other people and connect.
Another part is that life is in Woolf's view hard. In Mrs. Ramsey's extended stream of conscousness in section 10 of "The Window", she contemplates life itself.
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Only she thought life—and a little strip of time presented itself to her eyes—her fifty years. There it was before her—life. Life, she thought—but she did not finish her thought. She took a look at life, for she had a clear sense of it there, something real, something private, which she shared neither with her children nor with her husband. A sort of transaction went on between them, in which she was on one side, and life was on another, and she was always trying to get the better of it, as it was of her; and sometimes they parleyed (when she sat alone); there were, she remembered, great reconciliation scenes; but for the most part, oddly enough, she must admit that she felt this thing that she called life terrible, hostile, and quick to pounce on you if you gave it a chance. There were eternal problems: suffering; death; the poor. There was always a woman dying of cancer even here. And yet she had said to all these children, You shall go through it all. To eight people she had said relentlessly that (and the bill for the greenhouse would be fifty pounds). For that reason, knowing what was before them—love and ambition and being wretched alone in dreary places—she had often the feeling, Why must they grow up and lose it all? And then she said to herself, brandishing her sword at life, Nonsense. They will be perfectly happy.
Life, time, nature is a fight, a struggle to overcome. There is irony throughout that passage. We know they will not all be happy. We know that nature and time will dislocate the entire house in the upcoming part II, "Time Passes." The natural elements will over power the human struggle. And that struggle is individual. Here's one of the passages where Mrs. Ramsey contemplates a fear that her children out on the cliffs may have encountered a tragedy:
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Well then, Nancy had gone with them, Mrs Ramsay supposed, wondering, as she put down a brush, took up a comb, and said “Come in” to a tap at the door (Jasper and Rose came in), whether the fact that Nancy was with them made it less likely or more likely that anything would happen; it made it less likely, somehow, Mrs Ramsay felt, very irrationally, except that after all holocaust on such a scale was not probable. They could not all be drowned. And again she felt alone in the presence of her old antagonist, life.
There are other examples, but let it suffice to say that the struggle is an isolating one, an indvudual combating the forces of nature and time. Another fascinating passage, which I'm sure most will overlook and go by, is where Nancy is playing in the water:
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Once on the beach they separated, he going out on to the Pope’s Nose, taking his shoes off, and rolling his socks in them and letting that couple look after themselves; Nancy waded out to her own rocks and searched her own pools and let that couple look after themselves. She crouched low down and touched the smooth rubber-like sea anemones, who were stuck like lumps of jelly to the side of the rock. Brooding, she changed the pool into the sea, and made the minnows into sharks and whales, and cast vast clouds over this tiny world by holding her hand against the sun, and so brought darkness and desolation, like God himself, to millions of ignorant and innocent creatures, and then took her hand away suddenly and let the sun stream down. Out on the pale criss-crossed sand, high-stepping, fringed, gauntleted, stalked some fantastic leviathan (she was still enlarging the pool), and slipped into the vast fissures of the mountain side. And then, letting her eyes slide imperceptibly above the pool and rest on that wavering line of sea and sky, on the tree trunks which the smoke of steamers made waver on the horizon, she became with all that power sweeping savagely in and inevitably withdrawing, hypnotised, and the two senses of that vastness and this tininess (the pool had diminished again) flowering within it made her feel that she was bound hand and foot and unable to move by the intensity of feelings which reduced her own body, her own life, and the lives of all the people in the world, for ever, to nothingness. So listening to the waves, crouching over the pool, she brooded.
Here is Woolf capturing the forces of nature and reaching back to primordial soup where life first originated and the over powering forces of nature which shapes and ends life. And the lives are so insignificant in respect to the natural forces. Mrs Ramsey's death, the death of the central character in the novel, is announced in a parenthesis.