The novel begins with a description, set in italics, of the sea at morning. Then six children in a nursery school, three boys and three girls, present their individual personalities and relationships in a series of soliloquies. The author continues to alternate short italicized accounts of the sea from morning to night with sections devoted to the six at successive stages of their lives.

They are united by their common admiration for a friend named Percival, who emerges only indirectly through their words. In a later section, the friends, grown middle-aged, reunite in a restaurant; in the final section, one of them, Bernard, reflects in old age on the meaning of his own and their lives.

Though the characters differ considerably, from farmer’s wife to university don, they all speak in very much the same stylized way throughout. They reflect on youthful hopes, the competition among them, the forging of a personal identity, the death of a loved one (Percival), and fulfillment or the lack of it.

The six characters may also be understood as various aspects of one person contemplating life. Thus, Woolf suggests that each person contains the male and the female, the married and the unmarried, the fulfilled and the unfulfilled.

Woolf had intended to call this novel THE MOTHS but changed her mind, no doubt because she believed that the rhythm, regularity, and relentlessness of ocean waves were more appropriate symbolically to her theme. The author thereby resolves, at least artistically, the ancient dispute between those who see permanence and change, respectively, as the basic reality. The waves are both, and the pattern of people’s lives--including the mysterious pattern of each life--continues as individuals change.

Bibliography:

Caughie, Pamela. Virginia Woolf and Postmodernism. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991. Discusses the artist figure in The Waves, using sources from other recent Woolf criticism to discuss her novel.

Hafley, James. The Glass Roof: Virginia Woolf as Novelist. New York: Russell & Russell, 1963. Discusses the “creative modulation of perspective” in The Waves and argues that the novel is a demonstration of the futility of intellectual analysis and the validity of intuitional perception.

Kaivola, Karen. All Contraries Confounded: The Lyrical Fiction of Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes, and Marguerite Duras. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991. A discussion that focuses on Rhoda’s relations to language and culture in The Waves. Rhoda’s exclusion from language suggests the restricted ways women can participate in culture. She has no place, no identity, nothing is fixed for her. She is equally alienated from her body.

Lee, Hermione. The Novels of Virginia Woolf. New York: Holmes & Meier, 1977. Includes a thirty-page chapter analyzing The Waves and comparing its stream-of-consciousness technique with those employed by Marcel Proust and James Joyce. Lee contrasts the lack of social realism in this novel with Woolf’s other novels.

Love, Jean O. Worlds in Consciousness: Mythopoetic Thought in the Novels of Virginia Woolf. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970. Contains a long and detailed analysis of The Waves as a movement from diffusion to differentiation and back. Progressive differentiation of the novel’s symbolism effectively expresses the growth and development of the characters.