Rhoda resembles Virginia Woolf in some respects. She echoes Shelley's poem 'The Question'. Rhoda is riddled with self-doubt, anxiety and depression, always rejecting and indicting human compromise, always seeking out solitude. Bernard articulates this struggle most clearly. Some aspects of Susan recall Woolf's sister Vanessa Bell. Virginia Woolf and The Waves Background Literary Devices Themes The Influence of the Other on the Self Throughout The Waves, the characters struggle to define themselves, which they do through their relationships with others. Virginia Woolf, The Waves tags: clouds, star 1874 likes Like How much better is silence the coffee cup, the table. Susan flees the city, preferring the countryside, where she grapples with the thrills and doubts of motherhood. The Waves by Virginia Woolf 38,469 ratings, 4.15 average rating, 3,911 reviews The Waves Quotes Showing 1-30 of 401 There was a star riding through clouds one night, & I said to the star, 'Consume me'. There is evidence that she is based on Woolf's friend Mary Hutchinson. Jinny is a socialite whose world view corresponds to her physical, corporeal beauty. In its exploration of selfhood, identity, and death, The Waves remains Woolfs modernist masterpiece. For Woolf scholars and the general reader, The Waves is an endlessly fascinating book, one that leads to many interpretations.

Neville, who may be partly based on another of Woolf's friends, Lytton Strachey, seeks out a series of men, each of whom becomes the present object of his transcendent love. When this strange, mystical novel was published in 1931, it was titled The Waves. Louis is an outsider who seeks acceptance and success. Woolf is concerned with the individual consciousness and the ways in which multiple consciousnesses can weave together.īernard is a story-teller, always seeking some elusive and apt phrase. The novel follows its six narrators from childhood through adulthood.

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