OS X Recovery does not load, stuck on white or black screen

I am using a MacBook Pro 17" (early 2011) white OS X Mavericks. Within the last 5 months my computer has "crapped out" on me twice. The first time, I shut down my laptop and rebooted the next day, only to have it load to a blank white screen. I was able to fix the problem (eventually) by utilizing OS X Recovery mode to wipe the hard drive and restore from a Time Machine Back-up.

Earlier this week, while I was using the laptop, the display started acting funny. First, the screen flickered and the image of the screen shifted such that the left edge was somewhere near the middle of the screen and the rest of the screen wrapped around to the other side... I restarted normally and everything was fine. Then, some 10 minutes later, the display again began to flicker and this time stopped on a dark blue/black vertical stripped screen (stripes about 5 mm in width, covering the entire screen). I restarted, but the laptop only rebooted to a blank white screen after the Apple logo and loading wheel screen.

I tried to restart into OS X Recovery mode holding Command + R. Recovery mode loaded initially, and I did the disk checks. Everything seemed fine. I didn't have my back-up drive with me at the time, so I turned off the computer and decided to deal with it later.

A few days later (today), I again tried to restart into OS X Recovery mode holding Command + R. This time, however, after the initial loading screen, the laptop booted to a blank black screen (the laptop was clearly still on and the fan was running, but no images on the display). I shut down again and booted up holding Command + Option + R and was able to load the initial "Internet Recovery Mode." Connected to ethernet I waited for the download to complete (took about 4 minutes), however again the screen loaded to a blank white screen and did nothing. Next, I rebooted holding just Option. This loaded the disk selection option, and of the two options there, I selected "Recovery 10.9.1." After loading the screen again returned to be just blank and white.

I would like to just reset the drive and load from a Time Machine Back-up. I download programs from the internet frequently for use in my engineering classes, and am suspicious that these may have caused an issue, but again I'm not sure. I would really like this laptop to be recovered for use in my last few months of school. Any suggestions?