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The Waves

4.1 of 5 stars 4.10 · rating details · 8,215 ratings · 584 reviews

The Waves is often regarded as Virginia Woolf's masterpiece, standing with those few works of twentieth-century literature that have created unique forms of their own. In deeply poetic prose, Woolf traces the lives of six children from infancy to death who fleetingly unite around the unseen figure of a seventh child, Percival. Allusive and mysterious, The Waves yields new...more

Paperback, 241 pages

Published by Penguin Modern Classics (first published 1931)

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Nov 28, 2012 Elizabeth rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: reviewed, 2012, in-by-of-england, modern-love, virginia-woolf-hogarth-bloomsbury

Writing about Virginia Woolf always evokes images of the sea, rivers, running water, frozen water, streams (of consciousness), and lighthouses. The word I use most often to describe reading her work is "whelmed;" overwhelmed and feeling my body dragged under the waves as my mind detaches, floats along the sentences, touching here and there. Overwhelmed as in the moment of drowning when everything goes still -- there's no more struggling -- and everything opens up but you can't grasp the whole be...more

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Mar 02, 2013 Sean rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: nonlinear thinker-feelers

Recommended to Sean by: Emilie

Shelves: somewhere-else

Time, it moves, it sways, to leave us behind
Minute by minute, the hands keep on down the lines
Time, it ticks, it clicks, towards the sun
We try to stop the clock, but it's already won
-Marginal Man, “Time”

I have always loved this song. It's on Marginal Man's self-titled third and final record, an album many fans disparage as their weakest, commonly citing the reason for their disgust as loss of the band's punk and hardcore edge that earlier marked their melodic sound. This criticism bores me. It...more

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Apr 15, 2013 Proustitute rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: british-irish-scottish-literature, bloomsbury, five-stars, favorites, 2013

Thus when I come to shape here at this table between my hands the story of my life and set it before you as a complete thing, I have to recall things gone far, gone deep, sunk into this life or that and become part of it; dreams, too, things surrounding me, and the inmates, those old half-articulate ghosts who keep up their hauntings by day and night; who turn over in their sleep, who utter their confused cries, who put out their phantom fingers and clutch at me as I try to escape—shadows of peo

...more

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Oct 17, 2007 Seddrah marked it as to-read · review of another edition

a great recommendation from a friend. Seems like it could be life-changing, or possibly a little sad or maybe both. The hand-written inscription in the copy I found used was worth the entire purchase anyway, read it:

2/14/84

Martin-

I'm sure you know that you've been on my mind a great deal over the last few days. I've struggled for words to capture my own grief at your mom's death, to express my appreciation for yours, and perhaps, to offer some solace by explaining to you how strong an impression...more

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Jun 17, 2007 Marissa rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I've read this book several times. The first attempt my mind drifted off half the time because there is no plot (which is perfectly fine). I wandered so much that I had to reread the final chapter but by the time I got to the last two pages I burst into tears. It vouches for the power of a book when the reader can be so moved by the ending after only truly paying attention to the final chapter.
I love what The Waves says about being human, being flawed, the importance of small events, small momen...more

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Dec 09, 2012 Emilie rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, 12, favorites

reading notes,
"If I never felt these extraordinarily pervasive strains — of unrest, or rest, or happiness, or discomfort — I should float down into acquiescence. Here is something to fight: & when I wake early I say to myself, Fight, fight. If I could catch the feeling, I would: the feeling of the singing of the real world." (diary)

"I jumped up, I said, 'Fight.' 'Fight,' I repeated. It is the effort and the struggle, it is the perpetual warfare, it is the shattering and the piecing together-...more

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Jul 18, 2011 Nate D rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: The introspective aged

Recommended to Nate D by: the stickiness beneath the leaf-cover

Shelves: interwar-maladies, britain

Six characters, seeming aspects of a single bizarre lyrical voice delivered as if under hypnosis, withholding nothing and brushing each vision with uncanny light -- six character tell their life stories while the eternal English landscape looks on.

Now glancing this side, that side, they looked deeper, beneath the flowers, down the dark avenues into the unlit world where the leaf rots and the flower has fallen. Then one of them, beautifully darting, accurately alighting, spiked the soft , monstro

...more Six characters, seeming aspects of a single bizarre lyrical voice delivered as if under hypnosis, withholding nothing and brushing each vision with uncanny light -- six character tell their life stories while the eternal English landscape looks on.

Now glancing this side, that side, they looked deeper, beneath the flowers, down the dark avenues into the unlit world where the leaf rots and the flower has fallen. Then one of them, beautifully darting, accurately alighting, spiked the soft , monstrous body of the defenseless worm, pecked again and yet again, and left it to fester. Down there among the roots, where the flowers decayed, gusts of dead smells were wafted; drops formed on the bloated sides of swollen things. The skin of rotten fruit broke, and matter oozed too thick to run. Yellow excretions were exuded by slugs and now and again an amorphous body with a head at either end swayed slowly from side to side. The golden-eyed birds darting in between the leaves observed that purulence, that wetness, quizzically. Now and again they plunged the tips of their beaks savagely into the sticky mixture. (pp.74-75)

That was the eternal English landscape looking on. Or rather the dark, inextricable obverse of the beauty with which landscape looks on. Here, now, is one thread, my favorite, of the main text's 6-part harmony:

Now I will walk, as if I had an end in view, across the room, to the balcony under the awning. I see the sky, softly feathered with its sudden effulgence of moon. I also see the railings of the square, and two people without faces, leaning like statues against the sky. There is then a world immune from change. When I have passed through this drawing room flickering with tongues that cut me like knives, making me stammer, making me lie, I find faces rid of features, robed in beauty. (p.107)

This book really had its teeth in me early on, but later, Woolf's motives and technique become somewhat too subtle for me. Rather than following these six lives on their fascinating independent trajectories, she makes them all reflections on a single critical life event, concerning a character who we don't have direct access too and who I have some difficulty caring about (he embodies a certain somewhat generic ideal that is appropriately fascinating to the school-age characters but perhaps should be less so to their middle-aged counterparts. And then all the delicious separate voices give way to one, in a long long essay that takes up a quarter of the pages. It's still good and insightful and probably bares re-reading for better understanding -- but regardless is less interesting to me than the actual story would have been, had it been continued.
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Sep 15, 2012 Bettie rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fradio, radio-4x, autumn-2012, published-1931, abandoned

Jane Lapotaire

From wiki: The Waves, first published in 1931, is Virginia Woolf's most experimental novel. It consists of soliloquies spoken by the book's six characters: Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny, and Louis. Also important is Percival, the seventh character, though readers never hear him speak through his own voice. The monologues that span the characters' lives are broken up by nine brief third-person interludes detailing a coastal scene at varying stages in a day from sunrise to su...more

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Jan 24, 2012 Sarah rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

ما أعجب أن نشعر بأن الخيط الذي نقوم بغزله تطول أتياله الرقيقة عبر الساحات المعتمة للعالم المتشابك.*
فيرجينا وولف

هذه الرواية أقرب إلى القصيدة الشعرية رغم أنها ليست شعراً، فالشخوص فيها وهم ستّة يتحدثون إليكَ كمن يتحدث إلى نفسه، إنه كما لو أنهم كانوا شخصاً واحداً استيقظ ذات صباح فوجد نفسه في ستة أشخاص، كيف لنفسه الواحدة أن تنفصل عن نفسها، مرة وثانية وثالثة ...؟ كيف يمكن لكل شيء في داخله أن ينقسم ويتكرر مرات لا تحصى، كيف لإحساساته أن تتكرر وتتجدد مع كل دائرة ضوء، وثم تعيد نفسها في الظلّ، لم يكن أحد ل...more ما أعجب أن نشعر بأن الخيط الذي نقوم بغزله تطول أتياله الرقيقة عبر الساحات المعتمة للعالم المتشابك.*
فيرجينا وولف

هذه الرواية أقرب إلى القصيدة الشعرية رغم أنها ليست شعراً، فالشخوص فيها وهم ستّة يتحدثون إليكَ كمن يتحدث إلى نفسه، إنه كما لو أنهم كانوا شخصاً واحداً استيقظ ذات صباح فوجد نفسه في ستة أشخاص، كيف لنفسه الواحدة أن تنفصل عن نفسها، مرة وثانية وثالثة ...؟ كيف يمكن لكل شيء في داخله أن ينقسم ويتكرر مرات لا تحصى، كيف لإحساساته أن تتكرر وتتجدد مع كل دائرة ضوء، وثم تعيد نفسها في الظلّ، لم يكن أحد ليحسّ الضوء ويكتب عنه كما تفعل فيرجينا، فهي تكتب عن الضوء وكأنه نفسٌ تتنفس وترتعش وتتمدد في الأجمة، ويسقط في الظلمة كما يسقطُ المرءُ في أعماق نفسه، محاولاً أن يعرّف نفسه بالوجود حوله، ولكنه يعود دائماً إلى دائرة العتمة، حيث لا وجود إلا لنفسه. كيف تمكنت فيرجينيا من أن تضع يدها على هذا الكم الكبير من العواطف والخلجات والأفكار المبهمة.. على كلّ تلك الحزم الضوئية والبراعم والقواقع الصغيرة، أن تلمسَ الجذور الدفينة وحلقات الإحساس الصاعدة في المساء، أن تتحسسَ الرذاذ المتساقط والرياح والذبذبات البشرية! كيف أمكنها كل هذا لولا عبقريتها،إنه كما لو أن جذور الأشجار والأزهار، لم أخرج بقراءتي للأمواج بقصة ولا برواية،لا ولا حتى بستّ قصص، ولكن القراءة تفتحت في رأسي بكمّ لا يفسّر من الإدراكات الحسية، وكل هذا النمو الأخضر للإرتعاشات الحسيّة، واستطعت وقتها أن أشعر بالتمدد الأخضر الحسّي للضوء في رؤوس الأعشاب والأشجار، وكما " يمتص النمو ألم هؤلاء الستّة " تمتص هذه الرواية أعماقك.
وإنه لا يسعني أن أقول أنني قرأت الامواج أو قرأت أي شيء على الإطلاق، لولا هذه الإحساسات التي تتدفق في ذاتي كلها بعد القراءة، فأدرك في لحظة تكاد لا تكون موجودة لعدميتها هذا اللاوجود الذي يتمدد في الظلمة، كما يتمدد الضوء.. في البدء برعشة وثم يلتحف الظلام بأكمله ويمضي به تاركاً وراءه نفسه في دهشة من وجودها الحيّ المتجسد. ولقد رأيت يومها إلى ما هو أكثر عمقاً إلى .. ما تحت الزهور، إلى طرقات العالم المظلم القاتمة حيث تتعفن أوراق الأشجار وتسقط الزهور، وتتفتح الجذور نمواً يمتصّ الظلمة في الأعماق، وأجساداً خضراء معلقة تمتصّ النور في الأعلى.
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Aug 08, 2012 Cheryl rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: classics, favorites

"Your book is a poem, and as I think a great poem. Nothing that I know of has ever been written like it...The beauty of it is almost incredible. Such prose has never been written and it also belongs to here and now though it is dealing also with a theme that is perpetual and universal."
Goldsworth Lowes Dickinson, Cambridge, 1931

"In this book she is striving...to convey a whole vision, the essence of life."
Storm Jameson, novelist

E.M. Forster explained that he found it difficult to express himsel...more

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Oct 14, 2008 Nancy rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: own

'The Waves' expresses the cadence of life in synchrony with the rotation of the environment and the course of instance. The novel follows six children as they progress from childhood to adulthood,chasing disimilar infatuations and aspirations. In sync with this theme,,Woolf includes intermissions of the amalgumations of nature,expressed in a torrent of mindfulness.

Constant thick,rhythmic lines of poetry from start to finish. What I found particulary astonishing was the character's insight and o...more

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Sep 29, 2007 Eric Phetteplace rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: prose

I knew Woolf had written some experimental stuff and this book was amazing. It's all narrative, but inside quotes and voiced by the characters. Very dreamy and elegant diction, surreal in that it's young kids making grand pronouncements that they couldn't possibly be capable of thinking. It's nice to read a book that goes out and defines its own style and really does something with it. Best thing I've read since Infinite Jest.

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May 10, 2007 Steven rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: Everyone

This feels as if Woolf were weighing the standards by which people live: The archetype for the socialite, the academic, the rustic, the consummate businessman, the dreamer, and the everyman...She holds up what each one identifies as worthwhile in life against the convictions of his/her friends, who have all pursued wildly divergent paths.

It's absolutely stunning, and something I reread every year.

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Oct 21, 2011 Yasmine rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I don't think I ever struggled with a 167 page book the way I did with this one, for starters, the book has no plot..the entire book is written in soliloquies which means that there's no actual dialogue..which makes it unnerving; your mind will definitely wander while you're reading, I couldn't focus half the time.
It is simply about 6 friends and their innermost conversations, hopes, dreams and struggles as they grow up and experience the loss of a friend.
I honestly think most people would hate...more

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Dec 01, 2008 Sara-Maria Sorentino rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: chuck, adam, danielle, allie maybe

Shelves: favorite-fiction, time-history

What to say? i'm in awe. striking structure, a literary marvel. it punctures the self and its attempts at narrative cohesion, with mystic sensibilities and rhythm. Commentators far more learned than myself have addressed the undulating soliloquies that form this rarefied piece, and they've done it with care and great insight.

Something more in the terrain of that which I can comfortably vocalize is woolf’s attitude towards empire. She has her moments of outright condemnation-- to be found in her...more

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Apr 06, 2011 Jamie rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 1001-books, read-in-2010, read-in-2011

As usual, I'm rather at a loss for words with yet another breathtaking Woolf novel; as Bernard (of the novel) might remark, "I need a little language such as lovers use, words of one syllable such as children speak...I need a howl; a cry." Nothing else will suffice.

I'm likewise hesitant because I feel I've already done the novel a disservice in the reading of it, for a number of reasons. The prose is quite a bit like poetry & truly will wash over like waves if you allow it. Sometimes, this i...more As usual, I'm rather at a loss for words with yet another breathtaking Woolf novel; as Bernard (of the novel) might remark, "I need a little language such as lovers use, words of one syllable such as children speak...I need a howl; a cry." Nothing else will suffice.

I'm likewise hesitant because I feel I've already done the novel a disservice in the reading of it, for a number of reasons. The prose is quite a bit like poetry & truly will wash over like waves if you allow it. Sometimes, this is a great, almost tactile, experience with the language. At other times, you have to re-read a passage three times because osmosis just isn't doing it for comprehension or memory. I worry, too, about trying to wrap my head around any Woolf novel without at least one solid second reading (Mrs. D & Between the Acts seemed atrocious on my first try--by the second go-round, both tiptoed up into the ranks of my all-time favorite books). Finally, if you think Woolf is usually fairly experimental, try reading The Waves--it traverses places no other Woolf work (that I can think of at the moment, anyhow) really dares to. It's stream of consciousness, of sorts, but has an entirely different sensation to something like Mrs. Dalloway. There's perhaps *technically* more plot in this text than any other, simply because we follow six characters throughout the entirety of their lives, so the experiences amassed would, presumably, add up to more plot than some of the other works. But it doesn't feel at all engaged with plot--rather, it's a lot like Bernard's quote that I cited above; phrases can never approximate experience, & so plotting, narrative, & the like all merely create something that wasn't necessarily coherent (I love that all of the characters are somewhat terrified of coherence, of being one thing rather than a multitude).

I do feel like I'll always have these six little figures in my heart; we come to know them more intimately than perhaps any other fictional characters I've encountered. This is a glimpse into the inner world of the other at its most shimmering & naked. At times, it feels almost invasive or voyeuristic; I feel particularly bad about peering in on Rhoda's thoughts, for instance; and at times, I'm slightly embarrassed for Jinny when she so brazenly revels in her own narcissism. At other moments, I find myself as drawn in by Jinny's radiance as everyone else (incl. Jinny) seem to be; or I feel myself to be Rhoda herself, and so experiencing that terror with her, rather than watching her experience it.

In short, I feel like this deserves another reading or eight before I try and slap a label or a phrase on it. I think the book resists all of that very intentionally; all I can say is that even if I didn't feel engaged on every last page of the novel, the prose is mindblowing & I've rarely experienced a novel that seems so easily able to take a simple moment and use it to wrench your heart out of your chest & stomp all over it (very politely, of course, Woolf's a Brit). I felt incredibly vulnerable reading this, and so doing so in public was often an unwise move, because I found myself welling up with tears on several occasions, almost totally unexpectedly.

Of course, highly recommended. It's Woolf, what else could I say?(less)

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Mar 24, 2008 Brian rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: poetry fans and people who like books that push genre boundaries

I’d recommend The Waves to poetry fans and to people who like books that push genre boundaries.

The lives of six friends are told through soliloquies by each of the characters. My initial reaction was to think of some “performance artists,” 6 people dressed in black telling monologues, a spotlight shining on each in turn. This took some getting used to in the first chapter. Wouldn’t the story be better served by some good old-fashioned dialogue? I asked myself. Then I thought, what with blogs and...more I’d recommend The Waves to poetry fans and to people who like books that push genre boundaries.

The lives of six friends are told through soliloquies by each of the characters. My initial reaction was to think of some “performance artists,” 6 people dressed in black telling monologues, a spotlight shining on each in turn. This took some getting used to in the first chapter. Wouldn’t the story be better served by some good old-fashioned dialogue? I asked myself. Then I thought, what with blogs and MySpace and Facebook, aren’t we all performance artists of a sort? Am I talking to you or to myself? Sure, we don’t use such elegant language, but here is my head (or what I show of it) for you to walk in.

I loved Neville. He would be my hero just for explaining that he sucks at sports: “But I cannot stand in the sun with my eyes only on the ball; I cannot feel the flight of the ball through my body and think only of the ball. I shall be a clinger to the outsides of words all my life.” I also loved when, about 100 pages in, the characters, now in their twenties, met for dinner, and in about 2 pages they recapped everything that happened until that point in their lives. Very nifty. I loved how the characters could pick up on the thoughts of others even though they were never spoken aloud. I loved how one sentence literally made me do a double take and then had me flipping through the entire beginning of the book.

And I loved:
“…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.”

On occasion, I have felt that way. That’s why I want to walk in the Palace of the Winds with friends, just like in The English Patient!

I wasn’t a huge fan of the “wave” sections interspersed through the main story, but they were all very pretty. I also wondered what the six of these characters are doing together in the first place—is it a boarding school in the first chapter, a vacation house?

A review on Amazon said the book is challenging but rewards you with its beauty, but I’d contend that the beauty is evident just by flipping through some pages. I could spend a lot more time throwing out passages that I liked. This is only the crest of the wave, my friend.(less)

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Mar 19, 2013 Dolors rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: read-in-2012, best-ever

Poetry in prose.
Woolf writes without rules, no punctuation, no paragraphs, pure sensations, disarrayed and irrational thoughts, explosion of feelings.
We see life through the eyes of six characters, three men and three women, each one strikingly different from the other but close friends and lovers, from childhood to old age.

Early innocence, pure thoughts, playful games become more and more complicated when the characters grow up. It was devastating to witness how everyday life could break the ch...more

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Feb 17, 2010 amy rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites

This is such a confusing book, if you try and follow the plot exactly. Never mind what happens or doesn't happen, reading The Waves is like being underwater and glimpsing large shapes moving in the murky depths, and seeing wobbly shapes in the sky up through the water, and surfacing for brief moments in brilliant sunshine with salt spray splashing you in the eyes and a glittering city spread out in the near distance, before you're plunged bracingly into an icy pool or quietly re-embraced by the...more

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Feb 25, 2012 Sarah Beth rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: dinger-recommends

The inner monologue of six people (Louis, Bernard, Neville & Susan, Jinny, Rhoda) from the time they were kids in school til they were old and dying. Even though it is Bernard who takes on the central role of 'narrator,' my favorite is Rhoda (why do I always identify with the suicidal one?) who looks for things to hide behind and sets ships to sail in a bowl. I wish my inner monologue sounded as intelligent, as chaotic, and as pretty. It was a relief to find Woolf living up to my expectation...more

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Jul 04, 2007 Christa rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: all the world

Although the idea behind the book seems impossibly daunting, it is well worth the risk. A pivotal book for both English literature as an expressive art form and the reader at a personal level. Woolf examines human emotional responses, the connections we make and maintain throughout our lives and how loyalty and societal expectations can affect our actions. The language of the book...the thoughts and observations of the main characters... allows us to demarcate the social self and the internal se...more

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Aug 27, 2007 Heather rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Quite possibly the best book of all time. Woolf never ceases to amaze me with her masterful prose. I just can't get enough of her - and this novel I think is her best. She's never been able to create an antagonist (other than doctors - but they're so flat that they almost don't count). I think that this book is the best example from her portfolio as to why that is important. There are five very different characters working in this novel and somehow you relate to all of them...hmmmm...if you read...more

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Jan 21, 2009 Gillian rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Boy was this a different and most of the time difficult book. I LOVED the writing about the sun rise and set between the chapters, just beautiful but I gave up sitting with a dictionary by my side and decided that if I didn't understand a word or sentence to let it go and things often worked out, or not . . .

I found that if I sat for at least 15 minutes without disruption I could really get into the whole book and structure of the work, short periods of time or disruption were not going to work....more

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Apr 17, 2013 Öznur added it · review of another edition

"Les vagues sont des vibrations, les bordures mouvantes qui s’inscrivent comme autant d’abstractions sur le plan de consistance. Machine abstraite des vagues. Dans les Vagues, Virginia Woolf qui sut faire de toute sa vie et de son œuvre un passage, un devenir, toutes sortes de devenirs entre âges, sexes, éléments et règnes, entremêle sept personnages, Bernard, Neville, Louis, Jinny, Rhoda, Suzanne et Perceval; mais chacun de ces personnages, avec son nom, son individualité, désigne une multiplic...more

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Apr 07, 2013 Caitlin Park rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Virginia Woolf’s “The Waves” is a metaphysical exploration of perception and truth. The reader follows the poetic internal monologues of six different characters throughout their lifespan. While still being recognizable as individuals, Bernard, Louis, Jinny, Neville, Rhoda, and Susan exist within the same social constructs; they all seek identity through interactions with the outside world. The idea of “truth” becomes increasingly complex as each character struggles with the directions they take...more Virginia Woolf’s “The Waves” is a metaphysical exploration of perception and truth. The reader follows the poetic internal monologues of six different characters throughout their lifespan. While still being recognizable as individuals, Bernard, Louis, Jinny, Neville, Rhoda, and Susan exist within the same social constructs; they all seek identity through interactions with the outside world. The idea of “truth” becomes increasingly complex as each character struggles with the directions they take in life.

The book is broken up into nine different italicized sections, starting with the rising sun and ending with a sunset. The sun’s progression across the sky coincides with the aging of the characters. Also, within these sections, there is a changing description of the ocean’s waves, from calm to crashing. The sun, the waves, and the characters’ lives seem to mesh as one eternal cycle. The sun rises and sets, the waves swell and recede, and the characters live and die; a symbol that life is always fluid and impossible to capture.

The first section begins with a description of the rising sun and tranquil ocean: “the sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it” (3). Following this descriptive prelude, the six characters are introduced as children. They begin to question the motion of life that surrounds them while slowly branching out their own interpretations. In this early stage, their personalities seem to blend with one another, much like the sky and the sea in Woolf’s description. They probe the living world around them with fresh observations, as if they are foreigners in a strange land. The rising sun and calm waves become a symbol of the children’s beginning, before their personalities fully evolve and truth becomes cloudier. Rhoda exclaims in the end of the section that: “I am stretched, among these long lights, these long waves, these endless paths, with people pursuing, pursuing” (18). In her innocence, she foretells the vain struggles of each character as they attempt to define fate by pursing their own pre-constructed dreams.

As the characters grow from children to young adults, their carefully woven musings of life blossom into various philosophies. They exist at the pinnacle of their lives, right before the sun hits the middle of the sky and begins its descent. Jinny is content with her youthful beauty and captivating presence. She enjoys a social, polished life; her perception is based entirely in the tangible world (73). While Jinny revels in her present youth, Susan lives for her dreams of becoming a mother and wife on the farm (70). To her, this life is the ultimate fulfillment. At college, Bernard starts to prod deeper into the metaphysical questions of life, especially about his inability to discern the truth of his own identity from other’s (54). Neville embraces his existence, he is “in love with life”, and also infatuated with Percival (58). Oppositely, Rhoda surrenders to her ethereal existence: “I am to be broken. I am to be derided all my life” (77). Again, Rhoda takes the place of the outside observer; she foretells not only her own future, but the future of all of the characters. Each one, in turn, becomes “broken” by the constraints of life.

The last section describes the sea and sky being “indistinguishable”, and is followed by the characters’ life review from Bernard’s perspective (174). Throughout the story Bernard constantly seeks truth through language, his perception constantly in motion. He contemplates how death awaits everyone, beauty fades, happiness is indefinite, and language does not reveal fact. Also, Bernard broods over the truth of individual reality, concluding with the possibility that all of the characters were really united as one in their search for meaning: “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,” (205). Bernard discovers that they all do share a truth because they all have conscious thought, and they all live under the rising and setting sun with their lives mirroring both the calm and violence of the waves. This realization of oneness presents another question; what is the nature of the individual? If perception continues to emerge and evolve it is futile to pinpoint even personal truths. It is as if all of the characters are in infinite flux; their metamorphosis cycles as they shed their previous insights like butterfly’s cocoons.

At the end of the novel, the metaphorical significance of the italicized sections is seamlessly united with Bernard’s monologue. He mentions dawn as “some sort of whitening of the sky; some sort of renewal…Another general awakening” (220). Bernard anticipates the end of his conscious self, realizing it is the natural process of renewal, that the sun will rise again after it sets. Rather than give into the truth of death, Bernard quickly changes his tone from passive to aggressive: “And in me too the wave rises”. He doesn’t want to give into the mortality; he wants one last spar with death. After Bernard’s passionate confrontation with death, where he cries “Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!” the novel ends with an italicized “the waves broke on the shore” (220). It is as if truth is mocking Bernard’s futile attempt to battle “death”. He imagines the wave swelling within himself, fully arched while he experiences the climax of his realization. The cyclical nature of life undermines Bernard’s heroic outburst; no matter how long he dwells on truth and fights death, he will never escape the constraints of his consciousness and inevitable demise; he is destined to break on the shore.

Within the boundaries of the characters’ perception, there is no universal “truth”. While all six characters vainly struggle to find answers, time continues to progress, the sun continues on its path, and the waves are controlled by the pull and push of the tides. Bernard’s effort to contain truth is as senseless as trying to define the sun and waves during only one time of the day. Truth changes elusively with perception. The questioning void within the characters’ shared consciousness perpetuates a never-ending quest. Bernard’s various meditations of life conclude that no one can understand the reality of truth—its unattainability sustains the mystery of life.
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Mar 01, 2013 Joyce rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

It’s so poetic this book, it’s…it’s beautiful.

If you are looking for descriptions of waves, then… this book. You teeter along the precipice of this book being nearly totally overwhelming, what with the ways she can describe water kissing the shore… day night, rain or shine.

All her words will wash over you so powerfully, like being completely dragged underwater. You will have only moments to breathe, to grasp and comprehend a thought, an idea, before you are submerged under the waves again for a...more

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Nov 03, 2012 Camilla rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The Waves is one of my favourite books of all time. I think I bought it at a sale and one holiday decided to read it. It was winter and I remember sitting in the Highveld afternoon sun reading a paragraph for the fourth time. Not because I didn't understand it or was reading halfheartedly, but because it resonated with me in ways I did not yet understand.

When I younger, I wanted to be a ballerina, a writer, a marine biologist or an archeologist. I started many a novel and never got more than fou...more

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Jun 23, 2012 Diane rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: classics

I was immediately drawn into the beautiful prose in paragraph one. I was actually astounded by the skill it took to craft those sentences. Then I reached the "dialogue." I felt like I was reading a "see spot run" book with all the "Percival said" and "said Susan"s. And these kids were talking like no children would ever talk. I was disappointed. I persisted, but frequently found my mind wandering. I was struggling to understand which character was "talking" when. It seemed to change in mid-parag...more I was immediately drawn into the beautiful prose in paragraph one. I was actually astounded by the skill it took to craft those sentences. Then I reached the "dialogue." I felt like I was reading a "see spot run" book with all the "Percival said" and "said Susan"s. And these kids were talking like no children would ever talk. I was disappointed. I persisted, but frequently found my mind wandering. I was struggling to understand which character was "talking" when. It seemed to change in mid-paragraph. And there's nothing that really happens in this story. It is fairly plotless.

I must admit it took me until at least halfway through the book to understand the structure, and to realize what Ms. Woolf was doing. I have to think of this book as a 200 page poem. Once I got it, I was back to marveling at the beauty of the language and the skill of the author.

The book begins with a description of the sea. Woolf returns to images of waves and water throughout the book. In between are essentially the stream of conscious ramblings of six friends, starting from their childhood and ranging until the end of their lives. The book is about the ebb and flow of time, memories, death, the meaning of life, and the indelible impact of friendships and events on our lives.

About trivial events and memory, "All these things happen in one second and last forever."

About friends: "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." And, "Am I all of them: Am I one and distinct? I do not know. We sat here together, But now Percival is dead, and Rhoda is dead; we are divided; we are not here. Yet I cannot find any obstacle separating us. There is no division between me and them. As I talked I felt 'I am you'. . .Here on my brow is the blow I got when Percival fell. Here on the nape of my neck is the kiss Jinny gave Louis. My eyes fill with Susan's tears. I see far away, quivering like a gold thread, the pillar Rhoda saw, and feel the rush of the wind of her flight when she leapt."

And death: "What enemy do we now perceiving advancing against us, you whom I ride now, as we standing pawing this stretch of pavement? It is death Death is the enemy. It is death against whom I ride with my spear couched and my hair flying back like a young man's . . . ."

This is an amazing book. It is not, however, an easy read. Now that I get it, I feel like I would have to go back and reread it to fully appreciate it. So while Ms. Woolf very probably deserves 5 stars, I will defer that rating until I get smarter.(less)

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Jul 31, 2011 Farfished9 rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

My high school buddy and I would pass a journal back and forth in the halls between classes—filled with poems and short stories for the other to read and/or finish the lines to. One day he passed me a story where all the characters conveyed their meanings through inner monologues…one big long poem…beautiful…and totally unique….

Except…it was just the style that Woolf used in The Waves. I didn’t want to tell him this…he was so proud of this style…Years later at a bar we were talking about what’d w...more

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Jun 04, 2010 Rowland Bismark rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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 n...more 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. This idea is key to a kind of ethical dimension in Woolf’s writing. If we can see others as connected to ourselves, as part of ourselves, we will be less likely to objectify or exploit others to suit our own desires. By the end of the novel, Bernard is able to put his own desires, and even his own thoughts, to the side and to look upon others with a compassionate detachment born of the certainty that we all share in the same life, and are all journeying toward the same end.

Throughout The Waves, the characters struggle to define themselves, which they do through their relationships with others. Bernard articulates this struggle most clearly. He realizes that who he is depends on who surrounds him—his words and thoughts change in relation to his companions. Bernard sees the mind and the self as fluid, with permeable boundaries that enable people to “flow” into one another and essentially create one another. Bernard’s understanding of reality connects to this idea of “flow”: he sees reality as a product of consciousness. He rejects the idea of an “outer” world of unchanging objects and an “inner” world of the mind and ideas. Rather, our minds are part of the world, and vice versa. For Bernard, if there were no minds to perceive the world and bring it into being, the world would be empty. He applies this idea to the flower on the table during the first dinner party. Since seven people perceive the flower at once, it is a “seven-sided flower.” Later, after Percival’s death, Bernard thinks that reality itself is diminished by the loss of a consciousness—the flower is now only “six-sided.”

All the characters grapple with self-definition in different ways. Neville defines himself in opposition to society’s conventions and insincerity and tries to reduce his relationships to intense, pure devotion. Louis is deeply concerned with what others think and tries, with varying success, to shed his provincial self and to create a new, “insider” self. Jinny has a stronger sense of self than the others, and she happily takes her place in London’s social world. However, the physical self is for her the most real self, and all interaction is essentially physical. For Susan, a sense of self is rooted in a sense of place as well as in her relations with others, and she submerges her personal identity within the larger “self” of family and nature. Rhoda’s sense of self is the most fragile and oppressive. Unlike Jinny, who sees herself as all body, Rhoda feels phantomlike, unable to interact with others without losing all substance. She feels an intolerable pressure from contact with others, which, for Bernard, is the essence of selfhood. In the end, Bernard, who has always worked to overcome the false boundaries we create between selves, has the last word.

As the characters struggle to define themselves, they must learn to make sense of the impressions that flash before them and sweep them along. Each character longs for a sense of order and wants to find something lasting in a world of constant change. Louis, Neville, and Bernard have literary ambitions. For Woolf, one of the functions of literature and art in general is to bring order and meaning to the confusion of life. Life itself, as depicted in The Waves, is a constant stream of sense-impressions and random events. Art can be a place outside of the flow of time, where our fleeting perceptions can be made permanent and beautiful. Neville approaches his poetry with this goal in mind, and Louis also thinks of his writing as a way to forge an unbreakable link out of the chaos of daily life.

Rhoda’s response to the music of the opera hall and Bernard’s response to the paintings in the museum suggest that one of the functions of creativity is to bring a sense of peace and solace to life, especially when one is confronted with meaninglessness and death. But Bernard presents a critique of this function of art. He is dissatisfied with the way language and, by extension, all creativity must simplify life in order to give it shape. He rejects the traditional shape of stories, with a beginning, middle, and end, because he believes that such a shape is untrue to the way life is actually lived. In his final “summing up,” Bernard says he will not try to fit his life into any kind of overarching plotline. Rather, he will simply trace the events and try to highlight those that are significant as they arise. Meaning will then emerge out of the process of life in its full development, without the imposition of one person’s limited point of view. Bernard’s method is an obvious reference to Woolf’s own method in The Waves, and the novel can be seen as her attempt to address Bernard’s struggles with language and narrative.

Much of the characters’ self-knowledge begins in recognizing their own mortality. Louis and Rhoda, in particular, are aware of loss and emptiness from the beginning, but they all must confront death when Percival is killed in India. Each of the characters must then struggle to incorporate knowledge of death into the structure of their lives, and each follows an individual path with differing success. Death functions as a kind of reality principle in the novel, reminding the characters that their time is not limitless—death is the “enemy” that Bernard sees facing them all by the end. Five of the six characters, in some way or other, make a commitment to life in the face of death: Neville and Louis through art, Susan through the natural world, Jinny through her own physicality, and Bernard through language. Rhoda is the only one who does not commit to life. Bernard is at one pole of the awareness of death, vowing to fight for consciousness and meaning until the end, while Rhoda is at the other, surrendering at last to the pull of oblivion and joining the world of inanimate things.

In opera, a leitmotif is a musical phrase or melody that is associated with a particular character—when a character appears or is mentioned, the leitmotif is heard. Woolf makes use of a similar device in The Waves to differentiate the characters from one another and to provide an insight into their values and desires. She gives each narrator a set of characteristic phrases or gestures, and the appearance of these “leitmotifs” in various contexts helps us to understand a given character’s situation. One example is Jinny’s act of lifting her arm in summons to a man. For Jinny, this gesture is the sign of the power she wields by virtue of her beauty. As long as the gesture works, her identity is stable. Another example is the use of the term “making phrases” in relation to Bernard. The term has a different tone depending on who uses it, but it is always meant to evoke the constant stream of language Bernard is capable of pouring forth. Woolf also uses certain types of imagery around certain characters. Water is a leitmotif of Rhoda, history is a leitmotif of Louis, and leaves and growing things are leitmotifs of Susan.

"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..."
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About Virginia Woolf

(Adeline) Virginia Woolf was an English novelist and essayist regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century.

During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and Orlando (1928), and the book-length es...more

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“There was a star riding through clouds one night, & I said to the star, 'Consume me'.” — 389 people liked it

“Alone, I often fall down into nothingness. I must push my foot stealthily lest I should fall off the edge of the world into nothingness. I have to bang my head against some hard door to call myself back to the body.” — 96 people liked it

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