The Waves Themes

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…

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…

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…

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…