The Waves: a book on our shared identities
‘Like’ and ‘like’ and ‘like’ – but what is the thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing?
— Virginia Woolf, The Waves
How do we know ourselves and each other, how do we
understand a moment or a life in those terms?
The Waves by Virginia Woolf revolves around this question as it brings us to a world of complex but also simple personalities of the six voices of her characters. It is about both continuity and difference, about both the instability and constancy of the self and of friendship. It is a record of six characters where they attempt to say ‘I am this, I am that,’ but it is also a testament to their shared identity.
There is an almost conventional narrative arc here, tracing
their intertwined lives from childhood to old age. However, the work (and the
depiction of friendship) is structured less around plot than it is bound
together by rhythms and images that recur across all six. It may be that Woolf
speaks through Bernard, towards the end of the novel, when she writes “How
impossible to order them rightly; to detach one separately, or to give the
effect of the whole – […] like music”.
It may be that Woolf succeeds where Bernard fails, by
attending to that music and by allowing that simultaneity; the six are forever
isolated, alone, and yet forever knotted together by the “wandering
thread” of their collective experience, realized through the poetry of the
prose, “lightly joining one thing to another”.