The Waves

by

Virginia Woolf

Themes and Colors
Identity Theme Icon
The Meaning of Life  Theme Icon
Facing Loss and Death Theme Icon
The Power and Limitations of Storytelling Theme Icon
Colonialism and Conquest Theme Icon
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 Waves traces the lives of six main characters from early childhood to old age. As Bernard, Neville, Louis, Susan, Jinny, and Rhoda grow up, they remain intimately connected even as their paths carry them in different directions. There are two main ways of reading the relationships between these six characters: that they’re all emanations or projections of one consciousness, or that they are distinct individuals. Regardless of whether they’re…

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The Meaning of Life

As the six characters at the heart of The Waves grow up, they face the usual bewildering array of experiences that define human life. Notably, the novel begins in the darkness before birth and ends with Bernard confronting the unknowable darkness that follows death. Readers inhabit the six characters’ consciousnesses as they try to make sense of feelings like jealousy (Susan doesn’t like seeing Jinny kissing Louis in the garden), isolation (Rhoda and…

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Facing Loss and Death

Although The Waves starts when its characters are still very young, they are aware of death and loss very early on. When Bernard, Susan, Neville, Rhoda, and Jinny abandon Louis in the garden, he feels abandoned. Rhoda, meanwhile, feels her tie to humanity severed by the severe line of a zero during a math lesson, and at primary school, Susan becomes acutely homesick. At one point, Neville even overhears some adults…

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The Power and Limitations of Storytelling

The most outspoken of the six friends in The Waves, Bernard wants to be a novelist from an early age. And while he never writes his great novel, he does artfully tell the story of his (and to a lesser extent, his friends’) life in the final chapter. In a way, then, The Waves is a novel about both the power and the limitations of art—specifically storytelling—when it comes to understanding life and the…

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Colonialism and Conquest

When they are all young adults, Percival leaves Bernard, Neville, Susan, Louis, Rhoda, and Jinny behind in England while he travels to India on what the book implies is some sort of imperialist business—India was a colony of Great Britain until 1947. Louis, too, participates in British economic imperialism as some sort of overseas merchant. Through these characters—and their friends’ reactions toward them—the novel explores the enduring legacy of British…

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