A Reading of Virginia Woolf's Novel the Waves

Loran Gami
University of Tirana

Abstract

The paper focuses on one of the best-known literary works of the modernist writer Virginia Woolf, The Waves, published in 1931. The novel, which defies generic boundaries by fusing prose, poetry and the dramatic, has been considered the most experimental and “difficult” of Woolf’s books. The paper discusses the opposition between permanence and mutability, one of the key dualisms not only in The Waves but throughout Woolf’s fictional and non-fictional works. In The Waves the writer discusses the most fundamental issues that concern her – the identity of self, the relationship between self and the world, and the fleetingness of human life. The relationship between the self and the world has also been dealt with in the paper. Woolf often pits the natural, material world to the human world and the stability, endurance and permanence of the former is often contrasted and juxtaposed with the instability, meaninglessness and mutability of the latter. The Waves is composed of nine soliloquies uttered by the six protagonists interlaced with ten fragments in which an impersonal voice describes the movement of the sun in the sky from dawn to nightfall, which both corresponds to and contrasts with the lives of the protagonists. An important topic of discussion is also the clash between idealism and materialism and Woolf’s attitude in this perennial philosophical debate in her literary works.


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