Virginia Woolf’s first novel The Voyage Out (1915) leaves us a depressive ending where the young heroine Rachel Vinrace suddenly falls into a fever and meets an untimely death after her voyage to a native village. Critics have given mixed reactions to this anti-Bildung with Rachel’s helpless death, unwillingly admitting it as an inevitable function of plot against the imperial and patriarchal violence the novel attacks. Interestingly, as the critics blame Rachel for her passivity and lack of voice, they commonly criticize and reduce Rachel’s ways of relating with others as an “identification,” while undermining the various ways in which Rachel respond to the unknowable others. This paper aims to reconsider Rachel’s passivity as an essential nature of an ethical subject in the perspective of Levinasian ethics. Immanuel Levinas claims ethical subjectivity based on her responsibility toward the Other. The subjectivity of a subject is to be vulnerable to the face of the other who appears as a nudity. Being passive and vulnerable, Rachel responds to the naked, suffering face of others beyond the socio-political hierarchies of society and even beyond the limits of literary representation through her act of reading. Rachel also resists the imperial vision of ‘going on,’ a deceiving image of continuity, which obsessively confines the being of women only to a maternal role of sexual reproduction. Rachel’s failed Bildung rather suggests her possibility of being an ethical subject by her ongoing attempt to envision and reach others’ life while resisting the violence of imperial totalitarianism imposed on the construction of an individual’s singularity.