A Review of The Waves, by Virginia Woolf

I. Virginia Woolf’s The Waves is a novel composed almost entirely of speech delivered by six recurring characters. In fact, barring the short, impersonal, and prosaic preludes that begin each chapter, there is nothing more to the novel than a series of cascading, interweaving speeches made by these six characters. The extent to which there is a narrative viewpoint embedded within the book beyond these expressions is exhausted merely in there being consistent and accurate reporting upon who is currently speaking. We are always told by the novel who is saying what, and always in the same way (“X said”), but other than the speech itself, nothing further. Indeed, if the novel was rewritten to bear the same notational form as a play, where each piece of dialogue followed a name (“X:”), instead of being written in prose, the form and content of the novel would be almost entirely preserved.

It would be easy to think, upon reading this, that the novel therefore consists of a series of scenes involving overt interactions and conversations between characters, where the characters are continually responsive to the moves the others make within the human situation they jointly inhabit. It would be easy to think, given it is almost wholly speech, that the novel is a series of claims, questions, responses, retorts, rapport, and rebukes. This would be easy and even natural to think, but it would be wrong. For the dialogue constituting The Waves is not a conventional series of exchanges between human subjects, but instead a series of what could best be described as dramatic soliloquies.