The Waves

In Chapter 5, Percival’s death is the crux of the novel; in some ways it is the only major plot point of the novel and occurs exactly at the midpoint, highlighting its centrality. Percival’s death is key to the novel’s treatment of The Passing of Time and The Existential Human Condition: Identity and Meaning. In moving to India, Percival has already become absent from the novel’s action; his death is a conscious choice to introduce ideas of mortality, bereavement, and time. Percival’s death is an accident, and Woolf highlights the unpredictability of life and death and the ways in which accidental and premature death can challenge assumptions about the course and meaning of life. Although his accidental death is a challenge to meaning in its waste and tragedy, what people call a “meaningless death”, it is a catalyst for the characters to consider their position in the world and the courses of their lives in the past, present, and future with increasing depth.

Percival’s death returns his surviving friends to their senses of consciousness. The ways in which characters process his death and understand the world around them in the aftermath of his death is indicative of their own personal struggles and augment the novel’s exploration of their individual identities and reactions through the intimate stream-of-consciousness narratives. Neville’s reaction is one of deep grief. Although his love for Percival was always unrequited and Percival was already absent from his life, Neville’s knowledge of Percival’s being alive in the world is presented as having been key to his sense of self, and as part of Neville’s sensibility. For Neville, Percival is an ideal, like truth or beauty and Percival’s death will make this ideal increasingly unattainable and exacting.  

For Bernard, whose outlook on life is confident and positive, Percival’s death is a reminder of the importance of community. Bernard has just welcomed a son, so Percival’s death in conjunction with the birth of Bernard’s son highlights Woolf’s theme of The Passing of Time and its cyclical nature, reminiscent of her overarching wave image. Characteristically, Bernard considers Percival’s death in relation to himself, as the loss of his foil. Bernard and Jinny’s reactions show the importance of society in reaffirming their ties to life and meaning, as they seek comfort in socializing together.

Rhoda’s response to Percival’s death explores the existential challenge death can pose to life’s enjoyments and meaning; Rhoda sees Percival’s death as confirmation of the futility and pain of the human condition, a perspective of life that she leans toward throughout the novel. Woolf ties Rhoda’s despair closely to the motif of water, essential in The Waves as a symbol of time (short in human terms but eternal in nature), the natural outer forces of life and death, and the inner forces of human feeling. Rhoda seeks out the sea in order to mourn and performs a form of tribute when she throws the violets into the water. In literature, violets are symbolic of faith, inspiration, and innocence, and the novel shows that Rhoda’s action has a different meaning for her than the usual act of memorialization with a funerary floral tribute. The violets in the tumult of the crashing waves are indicative of her own relationship with life: This moment symbolizes Rhoda’s loss of faith in herself and in life as she symbolically gives what little remains of her faith and hope to the waves. She imagines herself “galloping together” with Percival and stater her resolution to “relinquish” and “let loose […] free the checked […] desire to be spent, to be consumed” (124). These words foreshadow her later death by suicide.

In Chapter 6, the surviving friends move into middle-aged adulthood. This period of their lives is defined by the establishment of routine and duty. Through the use of stream-of-consciousness narration, Woolf makes the distinction between childhood and adulthood clear, both in the details of the character’s lives, and through the theme of The Role of Language in Shaping Reality. By Chapter 6, the narrators of The Waves think mostly about their routines and their immediate desires in response to those routines. Rather than live in the moment, they are forced to dwell in reflection.

Woolf articulates how the demands of society and personal choices impinge upon an individual’s inherent capacities for selfhood, particularly through the character of Susan. Susan’s life as a mother of young children has that she has become removed from the communion with nature that makes her feel connected to herself; at this point in her life, her personal identity and the immediacy self-expression have become subsumed by the demands of motherhood and family life. Exhausted, her broken narrative reads like an out-of-body experience, “blown like a leaf in the gale” and also “glutted with natural happiness” (132). Unlike Susan’s homesickness at school, however, she acknowledges this stage in her life as something that she herself has chosen. Woolf’s intimate narrative style helps to express the many different possibilities of the human experience and emphasizes the necessity of life choices. That Susan is able to perceive and accept this necessity is key to her character’s contentment and resilience.