“The Waves” by V. Woolf & “The stream of consciousness”

A commentary:

In twentieth-century literature, a range of works was given birth with innovative visions by many writers. While postmodernist’s authors were considered to have tendencies on much more artistic rather than any ideas of depth, modernist’s authors tried to see the world in various points of view and experiment forms carried many expressions that how one an individual related to surroundings and what conscious desires of the society were in the period of a new century.

Thus, the author played the role of a mediator, who stood between the story and the reader and passed the narrative transmission. From this perspective, narrative art had a great contribution to how people can comprehend the value of one another and the universe. Depending on the creation and innovation of each writer, the narrative techniques can be sometimes omniscient narration in a temporal time with the author’s view, or one of the characters acts as the storyteller.

Especially, when the role of a storyteller divides into parts and the reader may see difficult to point out this kind of invisible narrator but due to its narrative structure, the reader is able to connect to the characters’ thought. This essay will reflect the narrative method as aforementioned, which is so-called “stream of consciousness” writing technique in The Waves by Virginia Woolf.

In The Waves, the consciousness is illustrated via different elements. By having looked at the title, it can be seen the plural form of a wave in terms of grammatical concept, “waves”. I believe that the abstraction is a kind of inherent symbol when the author lived and witnessed the very chaotic period of wartime. Hence, the waves represented the different discontinued and disconnected moments in life so that it would be understood in a figurative sense rather than literally.

Then, when it comes to analyze the character system including six soliloquized characters and the seven is an unspoken person, each of character has their own personality and the order they are organized in the story based on the author’s intention, which will be equally important to influence the way the reader interprets the story meaning in general.

However, the way that Woolf sets the structure of this narrative technique can explain the conscious connection between the characters and the reader. As seen, before each of the chapter related to a specific time and specific character, the italicized description, which break the traditional novel style, requires the author a difficult work that levels up the ability to plot the novel.

As a result, this kind of technique forces the reader’s thought to find out certain patterns to unify the novel as the whole. One more thing is the function of the characters’ narration. As mentioned, each character has unique insights themselves. Crossing many ups and downs in life such the aeroplane accident, or time passing when the striking of London’s clocks or the news of the death of Septimus Smith brought into the party. That is probably not adequate to tell the whole story but as the story is written from characters’ childhood to adulthood and thus the expression of thought and multiple consciousnesses can be intertwined.

Source

In conclusion, the total spectrum of consciousness in The Waves draws many aspects of thought within human beings. The narrative technique is a tool which the author let the reader read the story in the awareness of the thought process in order to understand the meaning of the whole story.

The story is such a miniature including fragmentations, emotion, and unconscious ideas, however, it is the truth behind and undergoes by all everyone’s images. Everything in a certain level of thought, from which the author skillfully let the reader read each other via the selves’ consciousness.