Although the lives of the characters are distinct, at instances throughout the novel they seem to synchronise their minds, or individual voices appear to blur together, conveying a united voice, a group identity.ĭuring the composition of the novel, Woolf wrote in her diary: ‘ The Waves I think is resolving itself… into a series of dramatic soliloquies. There is however a seventh character, Percival, spoken of by the other characters, though himself not possessing a voice. Woolf follows these six narrative foci from their shared childhood, to middle ages, across nine episodes or sections. The novel centres around the streams-of-consciousness of six different characters: Bernard, Louis, Neville, Jinny, Rhoda and Susan.

It is this fluidity of language which enables Woolf to present and detail ‘the self’ in such an extraordinary way, as the present thoughts of consciousness are captured and evocatively conveyed. Described by Woolf as a ‘playpoem’, throughout the work the sense of genre seems almost to dissolve, and the border between prose and poetry to blur. The Waves, published in 1931, arguably Woolf’s most poetical work, particularly adopts this device. Woolf, as one of the most prominent figures in literary modernism, created works which became renowned for their distinctive narrative method, particularly characterised by her use of the stream-of-consciousness mode. Simultaneously a defence of her unique style, the essay works to develop a theory of realism, and establishes the relationship between art and the real world in the new conditions of the 1920s.

Above is an extract taken from Virginia Woolf’s influential essay ‘Modern Fiction’, in which she argues for a new way of presenting experience and reality in the novel.

The waves by virginia woolf