Characters,Themes, Motifs,and Symbols of The Waves

Analysis of Major Characters
Bernard
Bernard is deeply concerned with language, and one of his first apparent traits is his obsession with “making phrases.” This activity is a means of both impressing and helping others, as in the case of Susan early in the novel. As a child, Bernard sees language as a way to mediate and control reality, to turn random events into a chain of meaning. When he leaves for school, for example, Bernard makes phrases as a way to remain in control of his emotions. Later, he begins to turn his phrases into stories, transforming language into a tool for understanding others. Here he begins to run into a problem, however. Bernard has trouble capturing the lives of others (such as Dr. Crane) in his stories, and he is nagged by a sense that some element of the truth always escapes him.
Over time, Bernard comes to think that the problem with his stories is inherent in language itself. Reality, Bernard comes to think, is always more complex than our words can grasp. Part of the reason this is so is related to Bernard’s concept of identity as fluid and changing. Bernard sees himself as a compound being, influenced by and even composed of the people who surround him. Bernard spends much time trying to break down the barriers between different selves. His dissatisfaction with language and traditional narrative echoes many of Woolf’s own concerns and gives a clue as to why she felt the need to try bold experiments with the nature of fiction, such as The Waves itself. In her memoirs, Woolf tells of certain moments, which she calls “moments of being,” in which she gains a direct perception of reality, apart from the distortions and omissions of language. Bernard has such a moment toward the end of the novel, and the moment is a kind of culmination for his character.
Jinny
Jinny lives her life utterly apart from concerns about the soul. She thinks of herself as a body, first and foremost, interacting with other bodies. From the first moment we see Jinny, kissing Louis among the bushes, she is a creature of motion, surface, and physicality. More than once, Jinny compares herself to an animal and the social world in which she moves to a jungle, in which she is a huntress. She is aware of her own physical beauty, and her greatest pleasure is in being able to pick a man from the crowd and summon him with a gesture. It might sound from this description as though Woolf is being critical of Jinny, but Woolf presents Jinny’s perspective as radically honest and admirably direct. She is not an intellectual and prefers to relate to a world of physical objects rather than ideas, but she is neither stupid nor insensitive.
In her own way, Jinny is just as devoted to beauty and to her ideal of life as someone more obviously idealistic, such as Neville. On the dance floor, swept up in the communal whirl of bodies and music, Jinny feels unified with something larger than herself, something like the flow of life. The problem with Jinny’s ideal is that it cannot be sustained: music ends, beauty fades, and attractiveness withers with it. Neville, Louis, and Susan are each deeply concerned with making something that will last, and this, of course, Jinny cannot do—this is the great failing of Jinny’s way of life. Catching a glimpse of herself in a mirror, she sees that her hedonistic time is drawing to a close, but she does not despair. Death is simply part of the bargain, and her attitude is carpe diem—seize the day, and live while you can.
Louis
Louis’s deepest sense of himself is that he does not fit in. Embarrassed as a child by his Australian accent and by his poorer background, Louis becomes an ambitious striver, eager to make his mark and to shed his status as an outsider. He becomes keenly aware of social distinctions and is drawn to Rhoda from the beginning, seeing her as a fellow misfit. At school, Louis discovers poetry and sees the tradition of literature as a kind of society open to those with enough genius and drive to gain admittance. From that point, his ambitions include becoming a great poet. But Louis does not go to college along with Neville and Bernard. Instead, he takes a job with a shipping firm in London, and from that time on, he leads a sort of double life. As he sits in a greasy-spoon diner, Louis’s attention is split between the book of poems he reads and the gossiping crowd around him. Later, he rises in the company and become a distinguished businessman, while still retaining his poetic ambition and his attraction to the seamy side of life.
Louis wants to unify the ideal realm of poetry with the hurly-burly of daily life—his idea of a poetic image is a mangy cat rubbing its side against a chimney. What Louis hopes to do by writing poems about such things is to reveal the permanent existence beneath the random flow of ordinary events. Louis’s project is somewhere between Jinny’s (submerging the self in life’s flow, without imposing concepts on it) and Neville’s (living a life of artistic isolation from everyday life). Woolf seems to be sympathetic to this plan, which has a certain resemblance to her own, but it remains unclear how well Louis is able to realize it. He seems compromised by his materialistic desire for success in business and his attraction to the tawdry. Louis and Rhoda become lovers for a time, but Louis is unable to forge a lasting connection there as well.
Neville
At first, Neville might seem to be a rather clichéd portrait of a homosexual aesthete: he is physically weak, overly refined, obsessed with male beauty, and somewhat promiscuous. But Neville is also a great artist—the most successful artist in the novel. Unlike Louis and Bernard, who also harbor literary ambitions, Neville centers his life on his relationship to his art, to the exclusion of most other relationships. This intense purity of focus seems to make the difference in his success as a poet. From the start, Neville is disturbed by mess and disorder, continually noticing Bernard’s sloppiness of dress. But Neville’s desire for order goes beyond the material realm. For Neville, life itself is a chaotic mess, and only in art and literature is perfection attainable. Neville understands this fact clearly after the death of Percival, whom Neville loves and idealizes. Once Percival is gone, Neville looks to a series of lovers for a temporary replacement for the intense feelings he once got from merely watching Percival. In each case, Neville uses his concentrated if fleeting devotion to the new lover as a source of energy for writing his poetry. In the end, Neville sees that he has spent an entire lifetime devoted to the study of love itself.
If Bernard’s problem with language is that it is not large enough to contain reality, Neville’s problem is that it is not focused enough to serve his particular needs. Neville’s life is one of concentration and exclusion. He shuts the world out from his book-lined room, awaiting only the approach of his latest “one.” Neville’s need for a focused, polished language to express his meaning is part of the reason for his disdain for Dr. Crane and for conventional religion. For Neville, the headmaster is a pompous fool, mouthing empty phrases, and most religion is little more than a collection of such insincere words. Beyond the platitudes of the sermons he hears, Neville also sees Christianity as a sad, death-obsessed religion and prefers the pagan Greeks and Romans for what he sees as their love of life and pleasure in this world.
Rhoda
Rhoda is an eternal outsider, even more so than Louis, to whom she is drawn for a time. Our first glimpse of Rhoda is as a child, staring into a basin of water that she imagines is her own private ocean. For Rhoda, the world inside her head is a refuge from the external world of other people. She is terrified of human contact, terrified of being criticized and judged. Her deep sense of alienation from others eventually turns into a desire to abandon consciousness altogether, rather than risk losing her perfect solitude through intimacy with others. Her most characteristic gesture, even among friends, is to stare out the window, lost in imagination. Nothing comes easily to Rhoda, and everything seems foreign—she has to carefully copy the way Jinny and Susan dress to avoid making mistakes. She comes to see herself as a ghostlike, faceless figure, drifting through life without affecting others. She ultimately commits suicide, though it is unclear exactly what occurs. Some of Bernard’s comments in the concluding section seem to imply that she leaps from a cliff, perhaps the same one she looks down from earlier in the novel.
Before her tragic end, Rhoda finds some measure of consolation from two sources, the first of which is music. In the wake of Percival’s death, Rhoda enters an opera house and is moved by what she hears. Death is both the ultimate disruption of solitude and its ultimate expression, and the music seems, to Rhoda, like a kind of structure in which she can find temporary shelter. Rhoda is briefly able to find similar solace in her relationship with Louis, but she is unable to maintain the state of intimacy and breaks it off. In the end, Rhoda’s greatest desire is simply to cease desiring and existing. She is drawn away from the basin-ocean, in which she has imaginative control, and into the ocean she sees from the cliffs in Spain, which she thinks of in symbolic terms as death itself—a vast ocean of emptiness and stillness that swallows her up.
Susan
Like Jinny, Susan is a strongly physical presence, and like Rhoda, Susan is at least partially motivated by a desire to lose herself within a larger force. But Susan wishes to engage with life through her body at the primal level of generation and reproduction, and through this process to become one with the growth of the land and of her home. From Susan’s perspective, Jinny’s life is one of sterile—literally fruitless—activity, while Rhoda tragically resists her body’s own desires. Susan walks her fields in the early morning, sensing the awakening life all around her, and Woolf’s appreciation of the value and reward of Susan’s choice is clear. Susan wants a productive, work-filled life that fosters the land and nurtures others. Through her life on the farm, Susan is seeking to find meaning in ordinary life.
Woolf acknowledges that sacrifice is involved in Susan’s life choice. Susan has always been emotional and passionate, either hating or loving (or both at once) most people she meets. As a mother, however, Susan must put others first, and she thinks to herself that her greatest emotions will be for and through her children, and most of her work will be on their behalf. At a certain point, Susan realizes that the price of the fulfillment she has found has been to lose herself within the role of wife and mother, becoming a generic, de-individualized person even in her own eyes. Susan looks back longingly at her youth and her first love, Bernard, whose phrases had always seemed too complex and subtle for her. She thinks continually of Jinny and her comparatively free existence. By the end of the novel, Susan’s life is shot through with regret, and she even speaks, to Bernard, of her life as a ruined, wasted thing.
Themes, Motifs, and Symbols
Themes
The Influence of the Other on the Self
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.
The Desire for Order and Meaning
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.
The Acknowledgment of Death
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.
Motifs
Stream-of-Consciousness Narration
In her essay “Modern Fiction,” Woolf describes life as “an incessant shower of innumerable atoms,” and she says that a modern writer must “record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall.” This idea helps explain the stream-of-consciousness method Woolf uses in The Waves. Rather than summarizing for us what the characters see, think, and do, reporting from the outside, or tidying up a character’s thoughts into standard, clear sentences, Woolf tries to give the reader an impression of what it is like to be inside the characters’ heads. She forces us to sift through a flow of sense impressions, inchoate emotions, and memories, just as the characters themselves are forced to do. In each section from each narrator, we get a combination of thought, sensation, memory, description, action, and speech, and we must separate for ourselves what is purely “internal” and what is a combination of “internal” and “external.” Woolf is trying to give a more realistic picture of psychology than had ever before been presented in fiction. Whether she succeeded in presenting accurate psychological portraits through this method, or whether consciousness is in fact anything like “stream-of-consciousness” fiction, is a common point of debate when approaching Woolf’s work.
Leitmotifs
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.
Symbols
The Waves
When the narrators are children, the first thing they hear in the morning is the sound of waves crashing on the shore. Each of them tries to make sense of the rhythmic pounding—Louis, for example, hears the stamping of a chained beast—and the sound becomes a background noise to their day. As the novel proceeds, the rhythm of the waves becomes associated with the passage of time. Certain characters are more aware of the passage of time than others. Louis is always sensitive to it, and Rhoda saturates her narration with water and wave imagery. Each of the characters has a moment in which he or she is reminded of the passage of time, and the effect is similar to someone who has become used to the sound of the waves at the beach and suddenly hears again the sound that has never ceased and that will continue long after he or she is gone. The novel itself demonstrates this idea of continuity, as it ends just as it begins—with an image of the breaking waves.
“Fin in a Waste of Waters”
On his trip to Rome, Bernard catches a glimpse of the sea from a parapet and sees a porpoise turn quickly in the water. He immediately turns this sense-impression into language: “Fin in a waste of waters” is the phrase he makes. At the time, Bernard simply files the phrase among all the others he has made, but the fin breaking the surface eventually comes to symbolize the way meaning and reality can break the surface of life with no warning. The majority of our waking lives, Bernard comes to feel, is made up of routine, boredom, and automatic actions and words—getting a haircut, traveling to work, and so on make up the “waste of waters.” Every now and again, we get a brief glimpse of what is real and lasting, a glimpse of being in and of itself—a hidden purpose in the emptiness of our daily lives. Neville uses a similar image when reading his modernist poem: he compares the poem to a searchlight trained on the waves at night, catching a glimpse of some creature just surfacing. This image clearly works together with the symbolic waves and indicates the understanding Bernard is able to achieve in the face of time and death.
The Apple Tree
The apple tree Neville is looking at as he overhears the servants at the school discussing a local murder becomes inextricably linked to his knowledge of death. Neville finds himself unable to pass the tree, seeing it as glimmering and lovely, yet sinister and “implacable.” When he learns that Percival is dead, he feels he is face to face once again with “the tree which I cannot pass.” Eventually, Neville turns away from the natural world to art, which exists outside of time and can therefore transcend death. The fruit of the tree appears only in Neville’s room on his embroidered curtain, a symbol itself of nature turned into artifice. The apple tree image also echoes the apple tree from the Book of Genesis in the Bible, the fruit of which led Adam and Eve to knowledge and, therefore, expulsion from Eden. Though Woolf doesn’t dwell on this particular connection, the idea of knowing “too much” makes sense in the context of The Waves. In a way, Neville yearns for knowledge—of his own self as well as the world—but is uncomfortable with the difficult reality of death.
Important Quotations Explained
1. I oppose to what is passing this ramrod of beaten steel. I will not submit to this aimless passing of billycock hats and Homburg hats and all the plumed and variegated head-dresses of women . . . and the words that trail drearily without human meaning; I will reduce you to order.
Explanation for Quotation 1 >>
As Louis sits in the eating-shop in the third section, he watches the people around him, contrasting their lives with the idealized world of the poems he reads. His own poetic project is conceived in terms of resistance, order, and rigidity. He thinks of poetry as a steel ramrod that he will use to straighten out the crookedness of reality. Louis’s tone is defiant, almost angry. He refuses to “submit” to the chaos around him and will “reduce” it to order. However, he still desires to include the details of modern life in his art. In contrast, Bernard becomes dissatisfied with stories precisely because they “reduce” life too much, while “reduction,” in the sense of the elimination of the ugly or mundane, is the secret of Neville’s creativity. Louis, meanwhile, intends to take a ramrod to reality. The human activity he is so captivated with seems like an ocean of chaos; the people are “aimless,” and their “dreary” words lack meaning. Louis wants to state the meaning these passersby will never see for themselves.


2. Should I seek out some tree? Should I desert these form rooms and libraries, and the broad yellow page in which I read Catullus, for woods and fields? Should I walk under beech trees, or saunter along the river bank, where the trees meet united like lovers in the water? But nature is too vegetable, too vapid. She has only sublimities and vastitudes and water and leaves. I begin to wish for firelight, privacy, and the limbs of one person.
Explanation for Quotation 2 >>
Neville asks these questions in the second section, while he is at school. Neville is distancing himself from the natural world and turning toward his own private domain. The problem Neville has with nature is similar to what Louis sees in the city—it is full of disorder and emptiness. Neville longs for both human warmth and for an ideal state of perfection. These two desires are contradictory, of course, but at this point in the novel, Percival is still alive and Neville has yet to learn of the incompatibility of perfection and temporal existence. Another problem Neville sees with nature is simply that it is too big. Neville wants beauty, including harmony, grace, and proportion, rather than sublimity, which is awe-inspiring, forceful, and huge. The perfection Neville seeks is by definition to be found on a smaller, more intimate scale. In Neville’s desire for form and organization, we can see the beginnings of his future life of books and seclusion with a chosen lover, as well as his fondness for classical poets and orderliness.


3. 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.
Explanation for Quotation 3 >>
In the seventh section, Rhoda travels to Spain, where she has this vision of the ocean from high atop a cliff. The scene is beautiful but ominous, and there is a double meaning to Rhoda’s statements about touching and seeing “nothing.” That is, what she is seeing and touching in this scene is nothingness, nonexistence. Rhoda is imagining the dissolution of her body into the larger body of the sea. The symbolic value of the “waves” is clearly active here as well—Rhoda knows she is constantly being dissolved by the passage of time anyway, and she is strongly tempted to give in to the process. As it happens, Rhoda does not give in to the temptation here, but this scene is a kind of harbinger of future events and a portrait of the drift of Rhoda’s mind. It also serves as a kind of counterpoint to the scene in which Bernard, also looking down upon the ocean, sees the porpoise break the surface. In his case, meaning and life come welling up from below, while Rhoda imagines herself being sucked under by meaninglessness and death.


4. How tired I am of stories, how tired I am of phrases that come down beautifully with all their feet on the ground! Also, how I distrust neat designs of life that are drawn upon half sheets of notepaper. . . . What delights me . . . is the confusion, the height, the indifference, and the fury. Great clouds always changing, and movement; something sulphurous and sinister, bowled up, helter-skelter; towering, trailing, broken off, lost, and I forgotten, minute, in a ditch. Of story, of design, I do not see a trace then.
Explanation for Quotation 4 >>
As Bernard begins his “summing up,” he expresses again his distrust of stories. As he says, the problem with stories is that they try to squeeze reality into a kind of straightjacket, forcing it into a predetermined shape. Bernard is always interested in what gets left out of the “neat designs of life.” For Bernard, stories have trouble accommodating the wild, formless nature of reality—illustrated by the roiling, shifting mass of clouds he sees overhead from his ditch. Bernard’s last sentence, which links the words “story” and “design,” suggests that he sees neither narrative meaning nor pattern in nature. Implicitly, Bernard is denying the presence of God in the world and saying that whatever meaning is found in the universe has been made by us in the act of trying to comprehend it. Woolf is clearly explaining her own procedure in The Waves in this passage. The novel tries to find meaning in human lives while staying true to the shifting, formless nature of reality.


5. 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.
Explanation for Quotation 5 >>
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.