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Chapter 9
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
When Neville receives the telegram informing him of Percival’s death, his world shudders to a halt. Percival’s death wasn’t grand or glorious. It was a freak accident: he was thrown from his horse on a normal ride and died instantly from his injuries. Neville can’t understand how life seems to keep going on outside his window when his own life seems to have ended with this news. The last letter Percival sent him—the last words they shared—were silly and mundane. There is no grandness in this story. No lesson other than that everyone is mortal: Percival, Neville, the man whose throat was cut in the apple orchard when Neville was a child.
Readers should note that Percival’s death falls at the midpoint of the novel, although not of the protagonists’ lives. This indicates its role as a core experience for each of them. Now, Neville must confront death directly; although the story of the murdered man was thrilling when he was a child, it had no direct bearing on his own life. The fact that his and Percival’s correspondence was broken off at such a silly point reminds readers about the power of death, which comes without warning. And it illustrates the painful reality that many experiences in life feel random and pointless. Moreover, the indignity of Percival’s death suggests first that he was, after all, just another mortal human being like the others, rather than the heroic, almost saintly figure they turn him into. It also indicates something rotten at the core of the Englishness and imperialism he represents.
Themes
Bernard gets the news about Percival at the same hour in which his first child, a son, is born. Dazed, unsure whether to be happy or sad, he looks at the world around him. Pedestrians fill the sidewalk, reassuring Bernard that the “machine” of life and humanity still works, even if Percival is no longer a part of it. In his mind, he addresses the people walking past, people who didn’t know Percival. He tells them what they are missing out on thanks to the death of such an exemplary man, one who should have been a leader of humanity. Then, he checks his maudlin impulse, reminding himself that even the magnificent Percival was, ultimately, just another human being. He vows not to idolize Percival but to remember his human frailty, too.
The book reemphasizes the idea that birth and death are two sides of the same coin in this juxtaposition. It's also typical of Bernard—who needs the company of his friends or even of strangers to help him understand himself—that he can only understand his loss and his joy in relationship to each other. Like Neville, he feels a bit shocked that the world goes on normally despite Percival’s death. It’s a forceful reminder that, no matter how much Bernard and the others lionized Percival, he was still just another mortal human being like them—and everyone else. Death comes for all in the end, and the sooner Bernard appreciates this fact, the more peaceful his life will be.
Themes
Bernard doesn’t feel like death is the last word. In some way, he’s convinced, he and Percival remain attached by the threads of their friendship. He decides to take a walk and finds himself at an art gallery. The pictures, which represent life but are not themselves living, give him enough distance from which to consider his loss. He will miss Percival who, in many ways, was his opposite. And he recognizes that there is something essential about death that he is not yet able to express. Now overwhelmed with solitude, he resolves to visit Jinny, who will reminisce with him.
Even though Percival has died, he lives on in the friends’ memories. But it’s more than that, Bernard thinks. If Bernard defines himself at least partially in contrast or relationship to Percival, then it's almost as if the idea of Percival persists in the world as the antithesis of Bernard. Tellingly, Bernard goes to an art gallery full of archetypes (each painting of a Madonna, no matter how unique, ultimately refers to the Virgin Mary, for example). Percival was an archetype of British superiority, and archetypes can’t die. And his shape persists in the nexus of relationships that binds friends together, too, which is why Bernard visits Jinny.
Themes
Rhoda hears the news of Percival’s death when she is on her way to buy stockings for a party. The mundane errands of her day contrast sharply with the shocking loss and the juxtaposition severs her sense of connection to the physical world. The buildings, people, and cars she sees seem ephemeral, immaterial, unreal. She feels utterly alone in a hostile world. Entering the shop, with its neatly arrayed baskets of wares, she has a glimpse of order and peace. But when she must speak to the shopgirl, that feeling dissolves like an illusion.
Rhoda receives the news of Percival’s death in the course of her daily errands, and the contrast between her search for silk stockings and the loss of her friend again emphasizes the indignity of his death. It also suggests that death is just another part of life, not some grand, separate experience. Finally, it hints that the best way to find solace in the face of death and loss is to embrace the mundane patterns of life. This last idea—that order persists in everyday life—is hard for Rhoda, with her social anxiety, to maintain.
Themes
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Walking into the street again, Rhoda thinks about how her friends will take the news. Louis will hold himself aloof, snobbishly pretending he’s better than everyone else as he always does. Bernard will weep dramatically while mining his experience for apt phrases to include in his novel. Jinny will ask if Percival ever admired her or just loved Susan. Susan will pause for a moment, then return to the comfortable domestic rhythms of her life. Neville will weep inconsolably, then gather violets as a tribute. Desperate to “recover beauty” and “impose order” on herself, Rhoda thinks about going to a museum, but she ends up choosing a music hall instead.
This is one of the rare moments where the book shows the reader any of the characters’ actions through each other’s eyes. Readers now know enough about each character to assess the accuracy of Rhoda’s assumptions about Bernard, Louis, Jinny, Susan, and Neville and accept them as plausible. Because Rhoda doesn’t usually find solace in the company of others, she considers going to a museum. The museum suits (and reflects) Rhoda’s way of looking at the world. Each artifact is carefully—and separately!—preserved under glass in a way that mimics Rhoda’s sense of time jumping from one experience or impression to the next with no connective tissue between. Yet, uncharacteristically, she immerses herself in living humanity in the music hall.
Themes
In the music hall, Rhoda settles down among other sleepy midafternoon patrons. A woman in a sea green dress takes to the stage and begins to sing. Then the orchestra strikes up and joins them. Percival’s death has shown Rhoda the lie in humanity’s attempts to impose order and meaning on the world. Human culture and civilization are like a neat square placed on an “oblong” shape. The square is well-made and tidy, but while it makes a “perfect dwelling-place,” it doesn’t fully encompass all there is to life. Rhoda wants to believe in this revelation, to trust in the square set on the oblong. She thinks about it as she goes back out into the street, buys a bouquet of violets, and flings them into the river that flows out to the sea as a memorial to Percival.
In the music hall, Rhoda has an epiphany that becomes one of the book’s central images—that of the square placed on the oblong. Rhoda sees the square as a house, which should immediately remind readers of the house that appears in the interludes describing the passage of the day. But in a larger sense, it represents human civilization generally—all the artistic, cultural, religious, and social ways human beings have sought to find order in the chaos of life. The square house is, in Rhoda’s mind, very well made and very comfortable. But because she exists on the extreme fringes of human society, she alone can see that it nevertheless doesn’t fit perfectly—and never will. This in turn suggests that, if there is a sense of order to be found, it will be in nature, not in civilization.
Themes
