The Waves
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The Waves, first published in 1931 is the most experimental novel of Virginia Woolf. Its form consists of six monologues for each of the six characters in the novel: Bernard, Louis, Neville, Jinny, Susan and Rhoda. These monologues are broken up by nine sections of short prose poetry detailing a coastal scene at varying stages in a day.
The six characters alternately deliver their "dramatic soliloquies," by which Woolf explores concepts of individuality, self, and the body. Each character is distinct, yet together they compose a gestalt about a silent central consciousness (represented by Percival, who is considered by each character but does not speak himself). Bernard is a story-teller, always seeking some elusive and apt phrase; Louis is an outsider, who seeks acceptance and success (some critics see aspects of T.S. Eliot, whom Woolf knew well, in Louis); Neville (who may be partially based on another of Woolf's friends, Lytton Strachey) desires love, seeking out a series of men, each of whom become the present object of his transcendent love; Jinny is a socialite, whose weltanschauung corresponds to her physical, corporeal beauty; Susan flees the city, in preference for the countryside, where she grapples with the thrills and doubts of motherhood; and Rhoda is riddled with self-doubt and anxiety, always rejecting and indicting human compromise, always seeking out solitude (as such, Rhoda echoes Shelley's poem "The Question": "I shall gather my flowers and present them--Oh! to whom?").
Probably influenced by James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the novel follows its six narrators from childhood through adulthood, a bildungsroman. The Waves obliterates the traditional distinctions between prose and poetry, allowing the novel to flow between six not dissimilar streams of consciousnesses.
Novels: The Voyage Out · Night and Day · Jacob's Room · Mrs Dalloway · To the Lighthouse · The Waves · The Years · Between the Acts
Short stories: A Haunted House · A Society · Monday or Tuesday · An Unwritten Novel · The String Quartet · Blue & Green · Kew Gardens · The Mark on the Wall · The New Dress
Biographies: Orlando: A Biography · Flush: A Biography · Roger Fry: A Biography
Non-fiction: Modern Fiction · The Common Reader · A Room of One's Own · On Being Ill · The London Scene · The Second Common Reader · Three Guineas · The Death of the Moth and Other Essays · The Moment and Other Essays
[edit] External links
- Project Gutenberg Australia hosts a free eBook of The Waves, note that copyright may apply in countries other than Australia - Zip file, Text file