Critics of Virginia Woolf's fiction have tended to focus their arguments on one of the following five cruxes: Woolf's personal biography, the role of art, the nature of reality, the structure of her novels, or they focus their arguments on gender-based criticism. Often, when critics attempt to explain Woolf through any of these categories, they succeed in constructing borders around her writing that minimize the multiplicities outside them.

Post-structuralist theory helps to open up difference in Woolf's writing, specifically, the theories of Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Their book, A Thousand Plateaus, allows readers of Woolf's novel, To the Lighthouse, outside the confines some past critics have put around it. I apply select Deleuze and Guattarian metaphors to Woolf's To the Lighthouse in order that multiplicities of the novel stand out. The Deleuze and Guattarian metaphors that are most successful in opening up difference in To the Lighthouse are strata; the Body without Organs; becoming; milieu and rhythm; and smooth and striated spaces.