‘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”.