Virginia Woolf's assertion that plot is banished from modern fiction is a misleading tenet of modernism. The plot is not so much eliminated as drawn out on a more local level, notably with the epic structural comparison of Ulysses. In To the Lighthouse, Woolf's strategy of indirect speech borrows heavily from Impressionism in its exploration of how painting can freeze a moment and make it timeless. In Kawabata's Snow Country, the story of Yoko and her family and its relationship to the rest of the novel corresponds to an even more modern medium, cinema, and its layering of contradictory images. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Lily Briscoe's metaphor stabilizes the chaotic reality around her, orders them into visible representation, and makes them timeless. She shares these goals with the Impressionists, for whom moments of being (as Woolf calls them elsewhere) are also “illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the darkness” (161). The immediacy of this image and its dependence on light are crucial to To the Lighthouse; through the unique match Lily and Woolf, start forest fires. Other parts of the story become clearer and resonate through specific moments of consciousness; one character's thoughts feed into those of another, the narrative voice filters through those of everyone else, and the reader sees, as Lily does, the "x-ray photograph" (91) of the desires and fears of each. The plot is compromised in these scenes, or in the throwaway line from "Time Passes" which tells us parenthetically that Mrs. Ramsay died last night. But just as this remark is framed in parentheses, each moment of being frames something else, a larger context that the singular moments reflect and refract. Woolf's work with voice is her legacy, but it is the voice that proves temporary (as in the case of Mrs. Ramsay) and the image, shaped by Lily, that endures. In Snow Country, cinema is Kawabata's subtextual art form of choice. When Shimamura looks up at the domed sky, Kawabata uses filmic imagery to describe her visual journey: “Shimamura imagined that her own small shadow was being cast on her from the earth. Each individual star stood out from the others, and even silver dust particles in the luminous clouds could be spotted, so clear was the night" (165). Shimamura literally projects himself into the void, through the "particles "silver dust" that resembles dust lit by a spotlight The characters in Snow Country are trapped within themselves, with a diminished ability to express their desires, but they thrive through cinematic images in the infinite landscape. of nature and the Milky Way, just as the traditional plot, although displaced, is informed by the moments of consciousness throughout the novel. The novel opens with Shimamura looking at Yoko in the reflection of his window. train Early filmmakers took advantage of trains to showcase their medium, as the rapidly changing landscape and multitude of framing windows were already an example of “moving images” We are made aware of in Snow Country, as in To the. Lighthouse, that windows serve three functions, just as the ocean is used in three visual ways in Moby Dick; we can look at them, through them, or their reflections. The latter is the most frequently used in Kawabata's work, notably in this first scene, and it underlines one.