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Chapter 17
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
Bernard, now an old man, tells the story of his life to the reader as if they were a stranger, or perhaps someone he met long ago and only half remembers. He does this even as he admits it’s essentially unfaithful to experience to try to impose narrative order on one’s life. He also acknowledges that he has a different vantage point than the others because he’s always been gregarious, a person who accommodated himself to the crowd of humanity rather than standing apart.
The book gives the final chapter entirely to Bernard, positioning him at the center of the group. In this regard, it’s notable that he’s always been the one most keyed into what the others are doing (and saying and thinking). It’s also worth noting that, although he never did write the book he imagined would make him famous, he now tells this story to a “you,” who functions both as a stand-in for the reader and as an unnamed dinner companion. This positions The Waves itself as the masterpiece work of art he always dreamed of creating.
Themes
The first thing Bernard remembers is the sensation of the water on his back as Mrs. Constable bathed him. This awakened him to the world. He remembers running through the garden with Jinny, Neville, Louis, Rhoda. He remembers the day he followed a weeping Susan to the woods and tried to comfort her with a game of exploration. He remembers how he became painfully aware of the differences between them as they developed “separate bodies.” Bernard loved society, while Louis despised it and Rhoda feared it. Susan couldn’t compromise, Neville worshipped reason, and Jinny longed for shallow admiration.
The final chapter brings the reader right back to the beginning. Bernard remembers the morning in the garden described in Chapter 2, and now he offers readers an interpretation of its meaning. In the very first pages, the six voices intertwine, describing the sunshine as if they saw it through one shared set of eyes. As they grow up, their viewpoints separate, suggesting the fluidity of identity across a person’s lifetime—they differentiate themselves. And while the book portrays this differentiation in part as the natural process of aging, it also considers that division of that innocent unity a terrible loss.
Themes
Bernard remembers primary school as a “leaden waste” of nearly intolerable boredom, broken only occasionally by excitement. In those days, he and Percival found ways to join in with the other boys, while Louis and Neville stood apart. People admired magnificent Percival not because he was exceptional, but because he was so unshakeable. Bernard still believes Percival might have changed the course of humanity for the better were it not for his tragic death. Where Percival’s exceptionality made him adored, Louis’s excellence alienated his peers. He was so driven that legend has it he once smashed a door with his bare fist. He’s been successful if not happy. Neville’s quick, eager, agile mind also set him apart from his peers, as did his insatiable desire for love.
With the benefit of hindsight, Bernard also gives readers further insight into what made Percival so important to him and the others. By now, Percival definitely appears as less of a person and more of an ideal, a shape against which the others measure or define themselves. Note how Bernard juxtaposes Percival with Neville and Louis to better explain the lives of the latter two. Bernard also engages in idealizing the dead Percival, imagining what he would have done if he had lived—but, of course, Bernard can only indulge in this fantasy because Percival died before he had the chance to disappoint anyone. Notably, this kind of idealization is exactly what Bernard swore to avoid in the immediate aftermath of Percival’s death.
Themes
Gregarious Bernard remembers there being many pretty girls in his youth. But the only ones who still have any solidity are Jinny, with her eagerness for love; Rhoda, with her wild, untamable spirit; and Susan. Bernard loved Susan for her certainty, for the way she hated and loved and nothing in between, and for the way she always knew and wholeheartedly embraced her place in the world.
Again and again, Bernard returns to the original unity of the six friends in ways that suggest that they are as important to his experience as his own self. No one else in his world has the same solidity in his mind as Jinny, Rhoda, Susan, Neville, and Louis—not even Percival.
Themes
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Bernard remembers a willow tree at college, under which he sat with many of his friends. It becomes a metaphor for life, a steady and eternal thing against which to measure the “eternal flux” of their lives. One source of that flux was the stream of personae he tried on in college and his obsession with Byron. Another was the force of his first experience of love. He can still feel its intensity.
The willow tree links this section to earlier passages in Chapter 6, which covered the protagonists’ college years. Throughout, the book uses recurring images like this one as fixed points that help the protagonists understand themselves (and that help readers orient themselves in a book that tries to convey time passing as it does in life, in a changeable way rather than fixed, linear way).
Themes
Susan never came to the willow tree, but the others did. Bernard describes how he sat there one day with Neville, watching a young man eating a banana near the river. He imagines Rhoda furtively approaching the tree, her existential uneasiness disturbing its peace. He remembers a romantic encounter with Jinny beneath the willow’s branches, and even an afternoon with “grim and caustic” Louis, already deeply involved in the certain world of business.
Because almost all of Bernard’s friends visited him under the willow tree’s branches, it becomes a convenient site to sketch out aspects of their temperaments— Neville observational powers, Rhoda’s fear, Jinny’s vital sexuality. The deeply rooted tree also suggests the vital force of life invoked by the sunlight and the waves of the interludes. The book insinuates that the tree has witnessed even more encounters than Bernard describes, and that it witnessed many more after he left college.
Themes
Bernard remembers floating through the early years of adulthood in which there was much delight but also some pain. He remembers in cruel detail the weekend on which he learned that Susan was marrying someone else. But he never got stuck outside the flow of time, in which Monday turns to Tuesday and Tuesday to Wednesday. At length, he met another girl, a Miss Jones, who inspired decidedly domestic thoughts and feelings in him. Soon, they were married and sharing a comfortable, conventional, middle-class life. And Bernard was mostly satisfied, even though there were moments in which envied his friends their autonomy. He would sometimes remember that he, too, once aspired to an existence so special that people would write about him after his death.
Bernard describes his life as the most conventional among his friends’. This, too, may be why the book makes him the final narrator and—by implication—the voice of truth. He's the most like the novel’s imagined reader, someone who mostly lives a normal life but is nevertheless sensitive to the deeper rhythms and cycles of life. These larger forces dictate that life goes on, and so in due time, Bernard finds that he’s got over Susan’s rejection (mostly, anyway) and found love again with Miss Jones. But it is notable that she’s never given a first name in the book—somehow Bernard never seems to have been able to know her as intimately as the people he grew up with.
Themes
But, Bernard says, Percival’s death interrupted this peaceful idyll. He had an out-of-body experience when he heard the news, and he still struggles to explain how it made him feel. The English language lacks the right vocabulary to fully convey pain. And grief—with its mixture of happy memories and regrets—is hard to bear. He recalls going to the museum, then on to Jinny’s house. Because superficial Jinny was always so resolutely committed to the present moment, she made him feel a little better. And he resolved not to “let lilies grow” on Percival’s memory
At this, the crucial center point of the story—Percival’s death—Bernard runs out of descriptive words. This recalls the earlier moment in which he complained to Neville that he cannot describe everything he observes. And it reminds readers that all stories—including the one that they’re reading right now—can only hope to convey partial glimpses of the truth. Here, Bernard remembers his vow not to turn Percival into a saint, but he’s already failed. Just a few pages earlier, he was extolling Percival in almost god-like terms.
Themes
Bernard remembers how strange it was to leave Jinny’s house and return to his own, where Miss Jones and their new baby were peacefully sleeping. For a moment, conventional life felt like a trap, the walls of his house a prison that held him from the essential heartbeat of life that he thought his friends understood better than he did. So, he visited each one to better understand. But eventually, the ordinary flow soothed his feelings. And he recognized that life will do what it will do, regardless of the narrative a person tries to impose on it.
When Bernard faced death for the first time, he was overwhelmed: he didn’t know what to do, and he began to worry that he had chosen the wrong path in life. Instinctively, he reached out to his friends—the people who originally helped him understand himself. He hopes that now they will help him integrate his newfound knowledge of death.
Themes
Bernard describes how he visited his friends in the wake of Percival’s death. He remembers Susan, in her fruitful gardens, heavily pregnant. When he left her house and sat waiting for the return train to London, he was overwhelmed with “dullness and doom,” with a sense that there was nothing in life he could explore or control. But this didn’t last long, and soon he felt the force of life flowing through him again, making him interested in the world once more. He jumped up, reminding himself to “Fight!” because the “effort and struggle” of life are what give it meaning. By the time he got back to London, he was once again able to see the beauty in the mundane details of life.
If the first half of the story, leading up to Percival’s death, is about the protagonists differentiating themselves—learning who they are and coming to express their individual identities—the second half of Bernard’s life moves in the opposite direction, back toward a sense of unity. But now it’s much bigger: Bernard longs to attach himself to the elemental force of life itself, a power that transcends his tiny, individual human life. When he feels almost overwhelmed by his consciousness of Percival’s death—which implies his own mortality, too—he finds the strength to fight by looking through a wider lens. This moment also retroactively helps readers to interpret the moment at which Bernard, overwhelmed by the prospect of having to part from his friends once again in Chapter 16, rouses himself from the table by crying “Fight!”
Themes
Thus, Bernard explains, he was able to keep going in the wake of Percival’s death, and life seemed pleasant enough even though he could never shake his awareness of mortality. It only fell away in brief moments, like when he visited Neville and the two fell into discussing Shakespeare or another timeless poet. But they couldn’t hold on to the recaptured sense of childhood’s timelessness. Invariably, Neville would be drawn back to the present as he listened anxiously for the sound of his lover’s approaching footsteps. And this would break the spell.
Although the book clearly considers facing death an important part of growing up, it doesn’t pull any punches about how painful and terrifying this can be. Nevertheless, this passage suggests that mortality makes the moments of timelessness and communion with others—brief and intermittent though they may be—all the sweeter by contrast. Still, there is a mournful feeling in Bernard’s account of the lost unity among the friends.
Themes
And so, Bernard says, he sought out Louis and Rhoda next, the two among the group who were always the most tenuously attached to the world. But when he knocked at the door to Louis’s attic room, no one answered. For a moment Bernard felt like he was the ghost. But he grounded himself by imagining Susan tending her gardens and Jinny entertaining handsome young men. Even now in his old age, Bernard can hardly think of himself as an individual person. He doesn’t know how to distinguish his existence from that of Jinny, Susan, Neville, Rhoda, and Louis.
Readers should remember the earlier scene in which Louis knocked on the door (of knowledge, or perhaps of social acceptance) and didn’t earn admittance. As painful as his experience was, the fact that the situation reverses here suggests that his outsider status gave him an important insight into the world denied Bernard. And the fact that Bernard knocks and hears silence in answer suggests that perhaps Louis’s situation wasn’t so singular as he wanted to believe.
Themes
Next, Bernard remembers the dinner he shared with his middle-aged friends at Hampton Court. After drifting apart through their various choices about life, it was a shock to come back together again. But when they stopped comparing themselves to one another, they rediscovered some of the old feeling. And when they walked together outside afterwards, their communion was complete—at least until Bernard, Susan, Neville, and Jinny broke the spell by turning back toward society. Only Louis and Rhoda could live stay aloof.
Bernard recognizes here—although he doesn’t say so explicitly—that he and his friend faced an essential choice in life: whether to embrace society and community. or to walk a solitary path. There are trade-offs in both situations. Bernard perceives Louis and Rhoda as special: he thinks they have some greater insight into thing than he himself does. But his conventional life was, on the whole, less painful and isolated than theirs.
Themes
One day after that dinner, Bernard says, he went to the barber for a haircut. In the chair he had a revelation of his own mortality. Not long afterwards, Rhoda took her own life. In the aftermath of that loss, Bernard visited a church, where he admired the tombstones of the mighty. But he couldn’t raise his mind to heaven. He’s not sure if there is such a thing as eternal life. When he imagines someone judging his life, it’s Louis, not God.
Now Bernard describes the second rupture in the circle of friends—Rhoda’s suicide. After Percival’s death, he sought solace in the things of this world. In the wake of Rhoda’s death, he turned toward religion but didn’t find any answers there. He confesses his own agnosticism, which suggests that if the book will find a larger meaning in life, it’s going to be outside of conventional religion.
Themes
Then one day, Bernard remembers, he realized that he had grown old. He was walking in the country when he stopped to lean over a gate and saw “litter [… and] unaccomplishment” strewing the late-fall fields. The voice that used to tell him to “Fight!” was silent. The light went out of the world as if during an eclipse and everything lay in shadow. But then, gradually, the light returned. Life in the forest and fields resumed, although Bernard has felt less substantial, more ghostly ever since.
The leaf litter Bernard sees recalls the dying vegetation from the interlude that came before this chapter. Here, it functions as another metaphor for his age and impending death. Bernard also makes a distinction here between general mortality—Percival’s death showed him that all people die—and his own. And at first, death seems like a terrifying prospect, like annihilation. But then Bernard senses the vital power of life in the world around him and finds comfort. His life may end—that’s why he feels ghostly after his revelation—but life itself will go on.
Themes
In fact, Bernard was thinking about how insubstantial the world seems just before he encountered his dinner companion at the restaurant and invited them to join him for the dinner during which he has told his story. Now that the meal is done and his story is drawing to a conclusion, he wonders if it has faithfully conveyed the truth. And he ponders whether he’s an individual self or a composite of all his friends. He’s tried to wrap the story of his life up into a neat package, but in telling it, he isn’t sure he has succeeded.
There’s also a contrast between the elderly Bernard’s claim that his life feels insubstantial and the detail and love with which he's just told his life story to his listener and the reader. And, as the book draws to a close, Bernard continues to ponder its questions about the limitations of storytelling and to be painfully aware of how he’s tried yet failed to articulate the relationship between his individual self and his friends. This in turn suggests that the book doesn’t mean for readers to take it as an ultimate authority, but rather as one source of potential revelation among many.
Themes
Feeling death coming ever closer, Bernard wonders if it’s even possible to make sense of life. In one moment, he considers life well-ordered and beautiful and in the next corrupt and chaotic. He wonders why people can inflict so much pain on one another—and he suffers as he begins to realize (or fear) that he’s boring his dinner companion. When they leave, he finds relief in the solitude. For the first time in his life, he doesn’t yearn for it to end. His notebook falls to the floor, but he doesn’t pick it up. When the restaurant closes, the staff usher him out to the familiar street. It is empty and it is dark, yet he senses the impending “break of day.” He feels as if he’s riding a wave that carries him forward like a knight jousting with his enemy, death. And the wave breaks on the shore.
On the verge of his own death, Bernard has a vision of the order in the universe, but he’s only able to glimpse it incompletely from his mortal vantage point. The book’s sense that there’s order to be found in the world, especially in the cycles of life, doesn’t prevent an individual’s experience from being painful or confusing at times. When Bernard’s book falls from his hand, it symbolically points toward his death—with the end of his life approaching, there’s no longer any need to store up inspirations for his someday book. But it can also suggest that the notebook has become redundant, since Bernard has grasped (however incompletely) the truth that the force that propels life forward (represented here by the power of the waves) will carry on long after he (and, by extension, even readers) dies. And thus, he faces his mortality not with fear, but with hope.
Themes
