The Waves

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The Waves

Author	Virginia Woolf
Country	United Kingdom
Publisher
Released	1931

The Waves, first published in 1931 is Virginia Woolf's most experimental novel. It 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"; paraphrased: I shall gather my flowers and present them--O! 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.

[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