Surfing Woolf’s “The Waves”

This strange, beautiful book rocked me.

POLIGNANO A MARE, JUNE 27, 2025.  What can you say about a book that says words cannot say what it is but says what it is, or tries anyway, over and over?

That conundrum comes to mind when I reach the end of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. It’s 3 in the morning, so I turn off the light and fall back asleep, hoping I’ll have more to say when I wake.

The next morning, an adolescent memory pops into my head: I’m standing beside a lighthouse, tripping, on a bluff overlooking the bulge of the Atlantic, and the in-rolling waves are inscribed with runes. If I can decode them, the runes will reveal everything, but they keep shapeshifting, their meaning eludes me, frustrates me

That’s how The Waves makes you feel at first: frustrated. You’re perpetually on the verge of a revelation that says: This is it! This is The Answer! After a while you realize, you accept, that there is no revelation, no Answer, there are, at best, epiphanies that quickly dissolve back into bafflement.

I dove into The Waves after sailing through Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. The Waves is an even stranger, more difficult novel. It consists of alternating internal monologues, reflections, meditations, whatever of six life-long friends, three female, three male: Jinny, Rhoda, Susan, Bernard, Louis, Neville.

Each gives you glimpses of his/her life, beginning in adolescence and moving toward old age. They fall in and out of love, pursue careers, have or don’t have kids. Youthful passions and dreams yield to adulthoods that are banal, disappointing, and yet still mystifying. Because even the most ordinary moment of the most ordinary life is mystifying, if you think about it.

Early on, you have a hard time telling Jinny/Rhoda/Susan/Bernard/Louis/Neville apart, because all speak in dreamy prose-poetry. It’s as though you’re eavesdropping on their thoughts when they’re lying awake alone at 3 am.

Gradually you recognize the voices of six individuals with divergent fears and desires, loves and careers. One becomes a civil servant, another a mother, another a novelist, another an academic. All wonder what the point is, if there is a point.

Reading The Waves resembles watching surf, it’s rhythmic, repetitious in a mesmerizing way. Now and then--pretty often, actually--a glittering translucent passage crests in a way that makes you murmur, Oooh, nice one. When that wave breaks, you look beyond it at the next wave, and the next, and next.

Occasionally a disembodied voice interrupts the characters’ ruminations to describe waves rolling toward a beach at different times of day: dawn, morning, afternoon, sunset, night, dawn again.

The juxtaposition of these third-person passages with the first-person ruminations strikes me as heavy-handed at first, a tad too symbolic, but after a while the back and forth gets to me. Woolf is animating an ancient platitude: Life consists of rhythms, cycles, repetitions, things go up and down and round and round, nothing changes.

And yet everything changes, incessantly, we exult, despair, fall in love, our hearts break, our bodies thicken and sag, our hair thins and gets gray. Moments of gladsadness give way to boredom and despair. This moment, right now, is unlike every moment that preceded it and will follow it.

Only with death do things end, and not even then. One wave crashes, others roll on, endlessly oscillating. The earth keeps spinning, the sun rises and sets and rises, life goes on within you and without you. That observation isn’t meant to be consoling, it’s just the way things are.

Woolf, like all great artists (and philosophers, for that matter), is a negative theologian. She insists that God, the fool on the hill, or reality, if you prefer, transcends description, and yet she tries to describe it anyway, to say what it is.

Woolf is a mystic who resists metaphysics. Toward the end of The Waves you get hints that Jinny/Rhoda/Susan/Bernard/Louis/Neville are all in some sense the same person. That’s trivially true, in that all six characters spring from Woolf’s imagination. That’s also a mystical cliche: we’re all one, thou are that, I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together. Ho hum.

But if we’re all one, we all diverge, too. And each of us stays the same while changing over the course of a life, decade, year, day, hour. Each of us is an evolving cosmos within an evolving multiverse. Thou art that, thou are not that, solipsism is true except it isn’t. Woolf dunks you in these old paradoxes, makes you see them anew.

Well before I finish The Waves, I look forward to being done with it. Yeah, the book rocks me, but after a while I feel like I’m drowning, gasping for air. And I’m curious: How will Woolf wrap this thing up? How do you end a book about endlessness?

I don’t expect a final answer, I’ve already accepted that there is no answer, illumination is illusory, ignorance eternal. Nothing matters, everything matters. We live, get old, die. Repeat.

Sometimes we die young, which happens to one character whom the others know but from whom we never hear directly. Either way life goes on and on like waves rolling toward a shore, and that’s okay. Because the world is round it turns me on.

The last page takes me by surprise, maybe because I’m reading on Kindle and don’t see it coming. When it does come one character, or all six, or perhaps Woolf, or all or none of the above, exclaims, “Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!”

That line strikes me as grandiose, it sounds like Kipling or Tennyson, one of those macho British poets. Is Woolf kidding? Then she adds a final line in italics: “The waves broke on the shore,” followed by, “THE END.”

And for some reason that little coda chokes me up, my heart breaks not just for the characters and their doomed creator, Virginia Woolf, but for you, for me, for all of us flawed, yearning, benighted mortals. The last page of The Waves reminds me of the final chord of “I Want You (She’s So Heavy),” which I’ve heard too many times to count and yet always catches me off guard.

Further Reading:

Woolf Versus Buddha (my take on To the Lighthouse).