Virginia Woolf The Waves

About The Waves

Virginia Woolf's The Waves (1931) is her most radical and most purely formal novel — six characters' interior monologues from childhood to old age, interspersed with lyrical italicized sections describing waves breaking on a shore as a metaphor for the passage of time. There is no conventional plot; instead, the novel gives us six different ways of being conscious, organized around their relationship to the absent Percival, who dies halfway through. Woolf's furthest experiment in stream of consciousness.