Virginia Woolf's novel “To the Lighthouse” (1992) can be considered a modern quest story. In literature, a quest is often used as a plot device and can be described as a journey toward a goal. The journey is primarily carried out by the hero of the story who must overcome many complications to achieve his goal. There are four important quests in the novel which are expressed by the four key characters; Mrs. Ramsay, Mr. Ramsay, James Ramsay and Lily Briscoe. The author, Virginia Woolf, also has her own quest that unfolds unconsciously through Lily Briscoe. Compared to Woof's modern narrative approach, Russian formalist scholar Vladimir Propp follows a traditional quest model, believing that there should be only one hero who prevails and that once the initial situation is described , the tale takes a sequence of thirty-one functions (Propp). 19). However, closer investigation of “At the Lighthouse” (Woolf, 1992) reveals some similarities between Propp's and Woolf's approaches to quest stories. In the first part of the novel, "The Window", Mrs. Ramsay is the center of interest and the most influential figure. . Mrs. Ramsay is the embodiment of Victorianism and does not wish for the emergence of a new order. She seeks to defend and instill in children traditional ideals of the Victorian era, such as marriage and the role that a woman should assume in providing her husband with constant reassurance and empathy; “…a single woman has missed the best part of her life” (Woolf 43). Mrs. Ramsay's quest pays particular attention to Lily Briscoe, over Lily's objection that the current Victorian system cannot persist. Regarding Vladimir Propp, the scholar who identified narrative elements in Russian folk tales, the middle of the paper differs from the following. Virginia Woolf followed a modern quest narrative in the novel, an innovative writing style for her time and especially as a woman of her time. Compared to that of the Russian formalist Vladimir Propp, the quest narrative is quite different with only some similarities between Woolf's modern quest narrative and Propp's traditional quest narrative. If Woolf were to follow Propp's thirty-one functions of a quest, it would completely alter the novel, because while Propp's theory may be accurate when writing folk tales, it is not an effective structure to follow for a modernist and revolutionary novel such as “Au Phare” (Woolf, 1992). Works Cited Propp, Vladimir. Morphology of the folk tale. American Folk Society. United States of America, 2003. Woolf, Virginia. At the Lighthouse. Oxford University Press Inc. New York, 1992.