The Waves by Virginia Woolf

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One of Woolf’s most experimental novels, The Waves presents six characters in monologue — from morning until night, from childhood into old age — against a background of the sea. The result is a glorious chorus of voices that exists not to remark on the passing of events but to celebrate the... read more

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The Waves is a portrait of the intertwined lives of six friends: Bernard, Neville, Louis, Jinny, Susan, and Rhoda. The novel is divided into nine sections, each of which corresponds to a time of day, and, symbolically, to a period in the lives of the characters. Each section begins with a detailed description of the course of this symbolic day.
The first section deals with early morning, or childhood, when the six main characters are attending a day-school together. As each of the children awakens, he or she begins an internal monologue composed of thoughts, feelings, and impressions. The children interact in various ways throughout the day, and each begins to take shape as an individual in response to the stimulus provided by the world and by the presence of one another. Although their thoughts are somewhat incoherent and mostly fixated on immediate experience, their distinct personalities begin to emerge: Bernard’s loquacity and obsession with language; Neville’s desire for order and beauty; Louis’s insecurity and ambition; Jinny’s physicality; Susan’s intensity and attachment to nature; and Rhoda’s dreamlike abstraction from ordinary life.
The second section deals with adolescence, after the boys and girls have been sent off to their separate boarding schools. Bernard, Louis, and Neville differ in their reactions to the school’s authority and traditions, and they all form friendships with Percival, a popular, handsome boy who is to become a central figure in the lives of the six main characters. All three boys develop literary ambitions of some sort, though they differ markedly in their goals and expressions. The girls mostly want school to be over and done with: Jinny desires to begin her real life in society, Susan longs to return home to her father and her farm, and Rhoda wants an escape from the disruptions to her mental solitude caused by school. At the close of the section, each character sets out, whether for college, work, or otherwise, on a more solitary track.
The third section traces the characters through young adulthood. Bernard and Neville are at college together and remain close friends. They both admire Percival, but Neville has fallen in love with him. Percival has become the focus of Neville’s desire for beauty and perfection. Bernard is concerned with his own gregarious nature and thinks deeply about the way his personality is constructed out of his relationships with others. Neville shares one of his poems with Bernard, and the moment is important for both of them. Louis is working as a mid-level clerk at a shipping firm in London. He spends his lunch hour reading at a diner and people-watching, hoping to make poetry out of his observations of everyday life. Susan is at home on her farm and communes with the rhythm of natural life. She walks across the fields before dawn and senses growth all around her, though she begins to submerge her own active will. Back in London, Jinny and Rhoda attend the same party, though their experiences are very different. Jinny comes fully alive in the social setting, and she takes a great, sensual pleasure in the beauty of her surroundings and in her own personal attractiveness. Rhoda, on the other hand, feels negated by the others around her and longs to disappear.
The fourth section is set later in adulthood and centers on a dinner party, meant to honor Percival, who is leaving for a position in the colonial government in India. At the party, the six characters are united again. At first, the group is tense and uneasy in one another’s company, and they primarily notice their differences. When Percival arrives, however, these tensions are relaxed and the group comes together. Briefly, the friends are united in a moment of true communion, and their individual voices seem to blend. All too soon, however, the moment ends and the group dissolves back into its singular parts.
The fifth section takes place not long after the dinner party, when the friends have learned that Percival has been killed in India. Neville is devastated by the news, overwhelmed by a sense of death and the fragility of life. Bernard is torn between joy and sorrow: his child has just been born and his friend has just died. Bernard goes to a museum to look at paintings and finds a kind of solace, even as he is aware that his memories of Percival must inevitably fade. Rhoda finds a similar solace in music when she attends an opera soon after she learns of Percival’s death, and she finds the strength to go on for a time.
In the sixth section, the characters have entered full maturity. Louis is rising in his firm and leads a sort of double life. Although he is a respectable businessman, he is drawn to the seamier side of life and spends his time roaming around poorer neighborhoods. Louis and Rhoda have become lovers. Susan is a mother now, both deeply gratified and stifled by her chosen life. On one hand, she is fully a part of the cycle of natural life; on the other, her own life has become subordinate to the lives of her children and the ongoing life of the farm. Jinny continues her purely physical existence, taking lovers but never settling down, content to revel in her own being. Neville also moves from lover to lover, but in his case, he is trying to keep the intensity of first desire alive—it is the source of his creativity.
The seventh section deals with midlife, as the characters begin to age. Bernard has traveled to Rome, where he observes the ruins and tries to come to terms with his own sense of failure, as he has begun to doubt both his own abilities and the ability of stories to capture reality. As Susan sinks deeper into her rural and domestic life, she regrets what she has lost even as she finds a measure of contentment in what she has gained. Jinny has a moment of dread in which she sees that she is aging and her beauty is fading. She reconciles herself to the inevitable passage of time, however, and resolves to make the most of her remaining years. Neville is becoming a successful writer. He is mellowing a bit, but he continues to shift the focus of his desire from lover to lover. Louis rises ever higher in his firm but still returns to his attic room to write. Literature seems to him an idealized realm even as his eye is continually drawn to the street. Rhoda has left Louis and travels to Spain, where she too has a moment in which she comes face to face with death—here in the form of the vast sea seen from the cliffs.
In the eighth section, the friends once again gather for a dinner, though this time the meeting is shadowed by death, thanks both to their increasing age and to the absence of Percival. Although there is tension among the friends, as at the earlier meeting, this tension is resolved as they begin to share their common experiences. The characters have lived long enough to know that this meeting is one such common experience, and they have another moment of silent communion, though the moment is elegiac rather than triumphant. Rhoda and Louis have a quiet moment together as the others walk into the park, but it inevitably comes to an end.
The ninth and final section is told entirely from Bernard’s point of view. Bernard speaks to a casual acquaintance over dinner, and tries to give a “summing up” of his life. Bernard is still doubtful about the accuracy of any representation of reality through language. He tries to give a sense of the texture of his life, rather than making sweeping statements about it. Bernard discusses the others and how things have turned out for them, including the fact that Rhoda has killed herself. The most profound moment Bernard describes is one in which he himself seems to move beyond language into a direct perception of reality. In the end, however, Bernard sees his life as an attempt to use language to fight against death, and he sees how the others have, in their individual ways, been part of the same struggle. Bernard vows to keep fighting until the end.

Characters/People edit see section history

Rhoda: One of the narrators. Rhoda has no father and is imaginative. She is particularly attuned to sounds and noises.
Susan: One of the narrators. Susan is often dissatisfied. The daughter of a clergyman, she prefers the rural life.
Bernard: One of the narrators. Bernard is friendly, garrulous, and in many ways the glue that holds the group of friends together. He is the least snobbish of the group, willing to talk to anyone as an equal. Bernard wants to become a novelist, though his hopes go unfulfilled. By the end of the novel, however, he achieves the greatest insight into the lives of the other characters.
Neville: One of the narrators. Neville is refined, intellectual, and upper class, with a deep appreciation of beauty. Neville loves Percival from afar, admiring him for being everything Neville is not—athletic, charismatic, and grounded in practical reality. After Percival’s death, Neville pursues many different lovers, devoting himself intensely to each for a time and then moving on. Neville desires order and beauty, and he tries to exclude much of the disorder and ugliness of the world from his life by isolating himself with his books and his lovers. Neville becomes a famous poet.
Jinny: One of the narrators. Lived with her grandmother in London. She pays attention to clothes and the way things look. She is known to move in a dance-like manner.
Louis: One of the narrators. Louis’s father is an Australian banker, and Louis is painfully aware of his own accent and his lower-class status in comparison with his friends. He is driven by a desire to escape his position as an outsider and to prove the superiority of his own intellect. Louis becomes a successful businessman, but he also wants to become a poet in order to make something permanent out of the passing disorder of everyday life. Louis is attracted to both the concrete reality of life in London and the ideal realm of art. He and Rhoda are lovers for a time, but she eventually leaves him.
Percival: A friend of each of the main characters. The boys meet Percival at school, where he is one of the most popular students. Percival is handsome and charismatic, a natural leader. He is killed when he is thrown from a horse in India, where he has gone to work in the colonial government. Percival is in love with Susan, though he does not act on it, and Neville is in love with him, though Percival has no idea. Percival is an idealized figure for the other characters, and they each respond deeply to his death, though in different ways.
Piny: Add a description of this character.
Mrs. Moffat
Smith
Archie
Byron
Mrs. Constable

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Quotes edit see section history

“Against you I will fling myself unvanquished and unyielding, O Death.”
“We melt into each other with phrases. We are edged with mist. We make an insubstantial territory.”
“I am the foam that sweeps and fills the uttermost rims of the rocks with whiteness; I am also a girl, here in this room.”
“To be myself (I note) I need the illumination of other people's eyes, and thereore cannot be entirely sure what is my self.”
“Our friends, how seldom visited, how little known—it is true; and yet, when I meet an unknown person, and try to break off, here at this table, what I call ‘my life,’ it is not one life that I look back upon; I am not one person; I am many people; I do not altogether know who I am—Jinny, Susan, Neville, Rhoda, or Louis: or how to distinguish my life from theirs.”
Late in the last section, Bernard returns to his idea of the fluidity of identity. For Bernard, all personalities are multiple: we are not self-sufficient, self-created entities. Bernard seems to suggest that we should be both humbled and comforted by the extent to which we have been shaped by others.
“How tired I am of stories, how tired I am of phrases that come down beautifully with all their feet on the ground! Also, how I distrust neat designs of life that are drawn upon half sheets of notepaper. . . . What delights me . . . is the confusion, the height, the indifference, and the fury. Great clouds always changing, and movement; something sulphurous and sinister, bowled up, helter-skelter; towering, trailing, broken off, lost, and I forgotten, minute, in a ditch. Of story, of design, I do not see a trace then.”
As Bernard begins his “summing up,” he expresses again his distrust of stories. As he says, the problem with stories is that they try to squeeze reality into a kind of straightjacket, forcing it into a predetermined shape.
“Beneath us lie the lights of the herring fleet. The cliffs vanish. Rippling small, rippling grey, innumerable waves spread beneath us. I touch nothing. I see nothing. We may sink and settle on the waves. The sea will drum in my ears. The white petals will be darkened with sea water. They will float for a moment and then sink. Rolling me over the waves will shoulder me under. Everything falls in a tremendous shower, dissolving me.”
In the seventh section, Rhoda travels to Spain, where she has this vision of the ocean from high atop a cliff.
“Should I seek out some tree? Should I desert these form rooms and libraries, and the broad yellow page in which I read Catullus, for woods and fields? Should I walk under beech trees, or saunter along the river bank, where the trees meet united like lovers in the water? But nature is too vegetable, too vapid. She has only sublimities and vastitudes and water and leaves. I begin to wish for firelight, privacy, and the limbs of one person.”
Neville asks these questions in the second section, while he is at school.
“I oppose to what is passing this ramrod of beaten steel. I will not submit to this aimless passing of billycock hats and Homburg hats and all the plumed and variegated head-dresses of women . . . and the words that trail drearily without human meaning; I will reduce you to order.”
As Louis sits in the eating-shop in the third section, he watches the people around him, contrasting their lives with the idealized world of the poems he reads.
“But I attach myself only to names and faces; and hoard them like amulets against disaster. I choose out across the hall some unknown face and can hardly drink my tea when she whose name I do not know sits opposite. I choke. I am rocked from side to side by the violence of my emotion.”
Rhoda
“Women shuffle past with shopping-bags. People keep on passing. Yet you shall not destroy me. For this moment, this one moment, we are together. I press you to me. Come, pain, feed on me. Bury your fangs in my flesh. Tear me asunder. I sob, I sob.”
Neville
“I have a little dagger of contempt and severity hidden up my sleeve. But I am apt to be deflected. I make stories. I twist up toys out of anything. A girl sits at a cottage door; she is waiting; for whom? Seduced, or not seduced?”
Bernard

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First Sentence edit see section history

THE sun had not yet risen.

Series & Lists edit see section history

This is book 654 of 1286 in 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. (authoritative list)

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Virginia Woolf (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Original Language: English
Publisher: Hogarth Press
Country: England
Publication Date: 1931
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 325

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Dewey: 823.912

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Reading Level: Adults

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Books › Literature & Fiction › World Literature › British › Classics › Woolf, Virginia
Books › Literature & Fiction › Authors, A-Z › ( W ) › Woolf, Virginia
Books › Literature & Fiction › Classics
Books › Literature & Fiction › Classics

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The Waves (1931) (edit title/settings)

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