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Summary
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
An unnamed narrator describes a beach at the moment just before sunrise. It’s almost impossible to distinguish the sea from the sky, but a line of darkness separates the two. Waves roll continuously in toward the shore with the regularity of a person’s breath. The line of the horizon becomes more distinct as the sky brightens. As the light gets brighter it almost seems to turn into a solid thing that pushes the gray sky up and away from the lucid water. Then, the rim of the burning sun appears on the horizon like an “arc of fire.” As it touches the leaves of the trees in the garden of the nearby house by the sea, the birds begin to sing and the sleepers in the house wake.
In between each chapter describing a period of the protagonists’ lives, the book includes a vignette or interlude like this one poetically describing the path of the sun across the sky over a house by the sea. These sections mirror and offer commentary on the stages of life, from childhood through to old age, with darkness and light standing for life and death. This first interlude begins at dawn, with the sun waking the birds, symbolically indicating the beginning of the children’s lives. Note, too, the regular, breath-like waves, which point to the underlying life force of the universe from which all individual lives rise and fall.
Themes
