The Waves

The Waves

The Waves consists of six main characters. Each of them hold a certain importance and act as narrator. Susan is most concerned with nature, and focuses most on smell. Jinny is more tactile and is also the most superficial of the group. She plays more of the city role while Susan plays the tradition county role. Rhonda simply flew away. Louis constantly tries to get back to the very beginning. Neville expressing the most feeling, and is in love with Perciville, who is written in a negative light due to none other than gender roles and politics of the time. Bernard is the most talkative of the group and, is who I was assigned to pay specific attention to. He constantly has something to say. While reading the novel, there were many times that I wanted to tell him to shut up! I hadn’t thought of it before it was pointed out in class, he is the cousin of the biographer in Orlando. He seemed to talk just to hear himself speak. It was not until the end of the book that I formed respect for his character. Everything seemed to come together. His words began to have meaning rather than just sound. The last forty or so pages of the book belong to Bernard. In last five to ten pages his tone changes. We discussed in class the possibility that Woolf’s voice came through in Bernard in the last few pages of the book.

The beginning of the book reads like a poem. We are informed, “the sun has not yet risen” (0). This is the first of the seasons that the reader is introduced to. Bernard is the first to speak—shocking, I know. He begins a game of what I saw as eye-spy. This game begins with Bernard, Susan, Neville, and Jinny seeing, while Rhoda and Lewis hear different sounds. Woolf’s decision to tell the first few pages of the book the way that she did was unique and compelled me to continue reading. It was as if they were each singing a different line of a song, or poem. Everyone had relatively short sentences and ordinary words. They are simple lines that a child could keep up with, again, making me think of the adolescent game of eye-spy. Jinny quickly grows up a bit as she describes to the reader running through the leaves to the tool-house where she found Louis. She kissed him, “with my heart jumping underneath my pink frock like the leaves, which go one moving, though there is nothing to move them” (7). Jinny is still a girl, in her pink frock, which illuminates her innocence. Thus, beginning the growing up and the changing and evolving that comes with the act of aging.

The structure that Woolf wrote The Waves in makes the book more interesting yet more difficult to follow. Someone will begin telling a story, as if they were being interrogated in a crime show. They are not defensive as much as picture perfect recollections. They remind me of when a character in a show like CSI, Cold Case or Without a Trace is interviewed. As they begin to talk the show always resorts to a flashback moment so that the audience can see exactly what happened. The story is slowly built and put together by several characters. The change in tenses is also unique. As an English major who has done my fair share of writing essays and reports, I have always been told to pick a tense and stick with it. Woolf bounces between past and present constantly. This is used at times to let the reader know that a character has left the narrator role and begun talking to another character. It also lets us know when the narrator is talking in real time. An example of this is on page 8. Bernard tells the reader that Susan has left all of them and is walking thought a field. He also says that he must follow her. When Susan speaks again, it is not to the audience, it is to Bernard, “I saw her kiss him” (8). They go into dialogue. They begin speaking in more developed paragraphs, which I saw as signs of growing up, maturing, and developing.

At the beginning of each episode there is a page that lets the reader know the location of the sun and the movement of the waves. Throughout the play, as the characters grow and the sun rises and falls, the buds bloom, and the waves rise and fall, we see many climaxes and declines. The symbolism is impossible to ignore. Life is full of repetition. Who has ever lived a life with only one dramatic event? No one. Life is full of unexpected ups and downs; it is a cycle. Just like the waves in the ocean, the sun in the sky, and the buds on trees. When I first found all of these symbols I was impressed, as usual, but then my emotions changed. I can’t help but find it depressing. Life is not a complete cycle, at least not when looked at from an individual standpoint. I will die, we all will. In the grand scheme of things that is a cycle but, our individual cycle ends. We will leave this earth and depending on your personal beliefs, will never return. But all of that is not the part that saddens me most. It is the fact that after we die the waves will continue crashing, the sun will keep rising, and the buds will bloom. While there is beauty in the power of a cycle, comes also a feeling of utter insignificance.