The Waves- By Virginia Woolf

 

Virginia Woolf was an English writer who is considered as one of the most important modern novelist and a short story writer in the 20th century. The Voyage Out (1915), Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) and The Waves (1931) are some of her fiction. She inspired feminism through her works. She was a pioneer in her use of stream of consciousness and her narrative device. 

She is also identified as a precursor of postmodernism as she has presented postmodern features in her novel The Waves. The Waves, which has written in 1931, can be recognized as the greatest novel that she has written which is formally and thematically different from her other literature works. Although this novel is composed in the modern period, it includes postmodern features. 

The Waves is composed in 1931 and it can be considered as Woolf’s most experimental work.  In the incidents in The Waves have gone through six different characters; three men (Bernard, Neville and Louis) and three women (Jinny, Rhoda and Susan). Bernard is thoughtful, Neville is meditative and he focused on beauty, which turns him a poet, and Louis’ character is a combination of Bernard and Neville. He possesses the practical aspect of those characteristics. Jinny is more interested in social issues whereas Rhoda is more tend to imagination rather than real life. Susan is attached to the nature.

In the The Waves, there are nine different sections which represent different phases of the six characters’ lives. The first section describes their childhood and the memories of the school. The second section deals with the adolescence and their lives in the boarding school. The third section is about understanding themselves better and the fourth section describes a dinner party which all the characters get together. Particularly, fifth and sixth sections deal with their learning of death and they settle into their lives even better. The seventh section describes their middle age. In the eighth section the friends meet again. Ninth section is also about the more personal relationships. Although this shows that this novel has written an orderly manner which is obviously a characteristic of modern literature, in The Waves the six characters are disconnected from each other and isolated from each other which is apparently a characteristic of postmodern literature.