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Chapter 14
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Waves, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Identity
The Meaning of Life
Facing Loss and Death
The Power and Limitations of Storytelling
Colonialism and Conquest
Summary
Analysis
The sun is sinking below the horizon, turning the waves red with its dying light. The narrator describes the breeze that rustles through the trees’ brown leaves. A hawk rises into the heavens just like the smoke from chimneys rises and becomes indistinguishable from the clouds. It’s harvest time and the crops have been gathered. The shadows grow long, and a solitary bird takes a sip of water from a pool in the middle of the moor. The shadows have engulfed all signs of human habitation on the landscape. It begins to fitfully rain. Inside the house, the waning light and growing shadows make everything seem larger, more foreboding. The growing shadows on the beach leach the hard edges from things and make the white foam on the crest of the waves seem brighter by contrast.
As the characters reach late middle age, the sun begins to sink and light fades from the world, giving readers a sense of impending death. Death lurks, too, in the figure of the hawk—a natural predator to the songbirds. Readers should also note the increasing isolation of the birds (which represent the protagonists) culminating in the image of one single animal sipping from the pool, an image which hints at the way that the book will end with the summary account of just one of its narrators. Still, light—life—lingers in the waves, suggesting that as the book’s protagonists face the end of their lives, that isn’t the end of the story, really.
Themes
