The Waves

Novel by Virginia Woolf, first published in 1931. Considered Woolf's most difficult and high modernist text.

The Waves is highly stylised and poetical: It consists of soliloquies of the six characters Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny, and Louis and alternates with descriptive pastoral interludes, printed in italics. These passages describe the impression of the diurnal progress of the sun on a seascape, its play of light, shadow and colour. In the soliloquies one of the characters reflects about their life spent together from childhood to maturity. A seventh character, Percival, who died in youth forms a voiceless center. In general the novel describes their life-long and agonising introspection.

In this way Woolf examines different concepts of individuality and the self, as well as diverse concept of community. In her diary Woolf wrote that that the six were not meant to be separate "characters" at all: “The six characters were supposed to be one, I'm getting old myself [...] and I come to feel more and more how difficult it is to collect oneself into one Virginia” [exact source??]. So each character can be seen as individual but they also compose a central consciousness together.

The novel is difficult to categorise, as Woolf herself conceives it as “a new kind of play [...] prose yet poetry; a novel and a play” (p.68: exact source??). It is often called a Künstlerroman because it is dense with literary allusions and many recent critics [who??] have praised the novel's eloquent silence, symbolic university and sense of cosmic unity.

Sources:

Goldman, Jane. The Cambridge Introduction to Virgina Woolf. Camebridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Lee, Hermoine. Virginia Woolf. New York: Vintage Books, 1999.

Suggested further reading:

Beer, Gillian. Virgina Woolf: The Common Ground. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996.

Warner, Eric. Virginia Woolf: The Waves. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.