Understanding Virginia Woolf's "The Waves"

No writer has influenced my reading and writing more than The Waves. Ever since its publication in 1931, The Waves has bewitched readers and critics alike with the poetic quality of its language and its complete lack of a “conventional” plot structure. To read (and understand) it is to surrender oneself to Woolf and trust her virtuosity to take one on a journey towards startling revelations about selfhood, togetherness, death, and the condition of being human. These are all weighty, abstract issues, but the lack of a structure allows The Waves to examine them all without seeming contrite. The soliloquies of the six friends are at times revealing, exasperating, confounding, and touching - covering the entire canvas of human emotions. The reader establishes an intimate relationship with the characters from the beginning, being ushered by Woolf straight into their minds and reading their most private ruminations. The characters struggle with life and all the obstacles its waves wash up on the shore, which the reader, too, is all too familiar with. He and the characters live on the same page; he co-exists with them in their “interiors.” There are very few novels that give the reader this kind of privilege.

This makes the novel some kind of a Pandora’s box: Open it at your own risk. Human thoughts after all are not arranged chronologically, nor are they always rational. They clash, contradict, confuse, get entangled. The reader must bear with vagueness and unreliability. This is a lot to ask of most readers, who have been conditioned to seek clearly defined characters and transparent plotlines in literary works. They expect the omniscient narrator to do all the work, while they lie back with the book and ask to be spoon-fed. The Waves towers over the reader, drowns him in mystery, and compels him to do what is necessary to reach the final page.

Interpretation is the work’s spine. Woolf does not interpret for the reader; she wants him to do it himself – to the best of his ability. This is because the world is splintered and fragmentary. Thoughts and identities are never unified. Bernard, the author in The Waves, has this to say about himself:

There are many rooms - many Bernards. There was the charming, but weak; the strong, but supercilious; the brilliant, but remorseless; the very good fellow, but, I make no doubt, the awful bore; the sympathetic, but cold; the shabby, but – go into the next room – the foppish, worldly, and too well dressed. What I was to myself was different; was none of these (174).

Later on he thinks:

… 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 … (185)

Since no-one is entirely “one person,” thoughts, perspectives, memories, views, and beliefs cannot be a single entity either. Such a proposition was vitally important, especially in Woolf’s lifetime, when Fascism and Nazism were casting a deadly shadow over Western Europe. The idea of the absence of unity and singularity should not be trivialised either in our era. The assumption that everyone is the same and holds the same beliefs and morals will soon lead to intolerance, bigotry, and perhaps, something even more sinister.

All page numbers refer to the 2004 Vintage Classics edition.