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Chapter 15
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
Solid and self-assured in his maturity, Bernard makes arrangements for everyone in the friend group to meet together for the first time since Percival’s death, at a restaurant at Hampton Court. Still, his assurance briefly fails in the moment that he greets his friends, because he’s all too aware of how shocking and how unfamiliar it is, how it takes time for old feelings to reignite and for their relationships to run once more in their established grooves.
Throughout the novel, Bernard has been the character most willing to overtly ponder the nature of his own identity. It’s not surprising, then, that he also seems to have grown up the most, since readers have had the most insight into his life. His momentary shock at the reunion—and the initial difficulty the friends have falling back into their old rhythm—suggests the changing nature of identity. They are all the same and yet not the same six who described the sunrise in Chapter 2.
Themes
As they sit down together, Neville realizes that the first emotion they all feel is sorrow that Percival will not—cannot—make their company complete ever again. He also knows this is a moment of natural competition, and he feels pressure to show that he has “passed”—that he has the credentials in his pocket. Credentials for what, he does not say. And he’s momentarily unnerved by Susan’s complete self-possession. She doesn’t need to prove anything to anybody, unlike Neville. In his mind, he tries to take her down a peg by characterizing her life as boring in contrast to his wild and exciting one. Yet, he realizes that his life isn’t full of limitless possibilities anymore, either. They’ve all made choices that have set the parameters of their adult lives.
The farther the protagonists get into their lives, the harder it is to escape their awareness of death. And while this brings sorrow (to Neville, at least—it’s not clear if he’s justified in assigning his feeling equally to everyone at the table), it’s also natural and wears off quickly. The way that the friends jostle and compete quietly with one another offers yet another reminder of the way that identity is socially constructed—each understands themselves at least partially in reference to the others. Except Susan, who increasingly seems to represent the elemental force of nature and the cycle of life and death rather than an individual person as the novel goes on.
Themes
Susan feels Neville’s antagonism and counters it with her own version of events. She admits he sees deeply into things but contends that his focus is too narrow. He sees deeply into his lovers, but only in short glimpse before they leave him. He sees details but misses the bigger context. He sees things as they happen but misses the deeper cycles of life and time. Through the window, Rhoda sees the sun setting, the light fading from the sky.
Susan and Neville offer the reader competing viewpoints in a way that doesn’t so much suggest one is right and the other is wrong as that the truth lies somewhere between the two. As part of the circle of friends, they both contribute unique and equally valuable viewpoints. Ideally, this seems to suggest, the reader who wants to approach life in the best way will strive to balance between the surfaces and the depths. And Rhoda’s glimpse of the setting sun pointedly reminds readers that they have limited time with which to work this out for themselves. Every day (and every life) ends eventually.
Themes
With sadness, Bernard remarks how difficult it is, now that they are all middle-aged adults, to recapture the easy movements of their childhood friendships. He’s all too aware of the way he’s become stuck in his own life, fixed in place like a puzzle piece wedged into the puzzle. Yet, in some ways, he is not fixed. His mind still wanders through possibilities and stories. It is not wedded too strongly to likes or dislikes, to certain and strong opinions. He is full of possibilities (in contrast to the fixed and opinionated Louis) and he imagines the stock of phrases he’s collected over a lifetime as clothes waiting for the right wearers to come along.
Bernard’s identity has settled into the path his life has carved out for him, but that doesn’t mean it’s turned to stone. He still feels some give and take in the world. His biggest strength has always been in seeing and taking advantage of the possibilities life has presented to him. Bernard and Louis contrast each other here in the same way Susan and Neville did previously and to the same effect—the strong suggestion that the truth lies between the friends rather than with one of them alone.
Themes
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But whenever Louis thinks he’s about to discover or name something fixed and certain, someone breaks the thread of his thoughts. Jinny did it when she kissed him in the garden all those years ago, as did the schoolboys who mocked him for his Australian accent. Even now he desperately wants to look for a singular, unified meaning in their life stories, their relationships. But he can’t, nor has he been able to get over his sense of inadequacy. Even now, he wants his friends to be impressed by his business acumen. Even now, he hopes his fashionable clothes and self-important manners will distract them from the vulnerability that lies at the core of his personality. He wants to be solitary, yet he yearns for company. He has earned respect in the world, yet he doesn’t feel like he deserves it.
Louis aspires to be like Susan, to be certain of things and to understand what each one means. The fact that he’s spent his entire life engaged in this project but has not succeeded hints that it’s impossible. Much like the book, life itself is too rich to be reduced to a simple or singular meaning. This recalls an earlier passage in which Bernard noted that he could observe infinitely more things than he can describe with words. Louis also still bears the scars of his initial trauma, the feeling that he doesn’t have the same right to be here (in England, successful, well-off) as everyone else. He’s changed but also remained the same.
Themes
If Louis wants to see through to the essences of things, Jinny is happy with surfaces. She likes to keep things simple and to focus on what she can see, touch, and taste. She’s interested in whatever catches her eye, like a dog stopping to sniff at the door of a butcher shop. She feels proud of her conquests, all the men she’s drawn to herself with the smallest gesture of a finger. She weighs and judges her physical appearance as carefully as Louis adds up the financial figures for his business, and she knows how to adapt her costume and her look to each situation. She knows that her beauty is fading, but this does not alarm her.
Jinny, too, has changed, at least in terms of her appearance. But she’s still fundamentally the same person she was when she was a child. She delights in pretty things, for example, and she prefers that she can directly experience through her senses. And although this leaves her life perhaps less examined than the others, her rich descriptions nevertheless provide much fodder for thought.
Themes
When Rhoda arrived, she approached directly rather than sneakily as is her habit. She has gotten better at acting out the part of a normal person, even though she still doesn’t experience life the way others do. Each sensation in the dining room—the voices of Bernard and Susan as they talk to the waiter, the yellowish spots on the white tablecloth, the beauty in her friends’ faces—appears to Rhoda as a distinct and inviolable impression. There’s something both specific and timeless about this meeting. In her imagination, the room dissolves until she’s standing in a jungle teeming with life. As always, she tries to call herself back into the mundane, material world. But she knows one day she won’t be able to, and her friends will let her fall out of reality and into the abyss.
Like her friends, Rhoda has—and has not—changed in the intervening years. She’s changed superficially in that she’s gotten better at playing the part of an average human being. She’s no longer so self-conscious in her copying as she once was. But she still struggles to find a feeling of continuity in experience. And the disturbing, threating images of her wild imagination haven’t changed either. Rhoda and Jinny are, in many ways, opposites—Jinny cannot see beyond the surface of things, and Rhoda struggles to keep herself from being sucked into the metaphorical depths. Each unique perspective adds to the book’s overall examination of life.
Themes
As they are sated by the meal, the friends drop into a comfortable silence. Bernard feels peaceful, and he imagines that the others—even vain and self-critical Louis—do too. For a moment, time and life itself seem to stand still, and death is suspended. But the silence is incomplete. Soon Bernard becomes aware of the ticking clock and the traffic in the street. He stands up and cries out “Fight!” Neville says they should oppose the “illimitable chaos” of time and mortality even while it’s clear to him that this is impossible. Whispering to Louis, Rhoda notes how briefly the others can stand silence. Already they’re returning to themselves. Jinny touches up her makeup and Susan buttons her coat. Yes, Louis replies, it’s because they want to prove to themselves that they’re still alive.
For just a moment after dinner, the friends manage to recapture the feeling of their shared, youthful experiences. But it’s fleeting. Each has travelled too far alone in life to be able to maintain their initial unity. And, the book insists, human experience proves the impossibility of this. People may wish to “Fight” (an exclamation Bernard will shed light on in a later chapter) or to set themselves at odds with chaos and death, but it’s not possible to do so. Death is a part of life, and the book has argued that the contentment of a person’s life is directly related to his or her ability to do so. As the spell breaks, the six friends retreat into their individual identities.
Themes
The friends all become aware of time once again as they leave the restaurant, but in odd ways. The flow of time makes formerly momentous things, like the reigns of kings, seem inconsequential to Bernard. Neville finds himself drawn into the historical past (to the reign of George I). Louis is drawn into his personal past, to the days when Miss Curry led him and the other children in their nighttime prayers. The six friends walk down the street, holding hands and feeling themselves fixed against time and eternity. The things that have separated them—marriages, deaths, travels, moves—all fade away.
The fluid shifting of time in the final moments of the gathering points yet again to the larger cycles that form the backdrop of each individual human life—at least in the minds of Bernard, Louis, and Neville. Note how their thoughts run on separate tracks yet still converge—they still have a shred of their original unity intact after all these years. Kings are crowned, reign, and die in endless succession; prayers repeat the same themes across the decades; friendship provides a bulwark against mortality. The way that Percival has lived on in the memories of his friends exemplifies this.
Themes
They split into pairs, Bernard with Susan, Neville with Jinny, Rhoda with Louis. Rhoda and Louis strain to listen for the song of the world. To him, it seems as if the reunion of the six friends has stopped death itself, but Rhoda still hears an ominous drumbeat calling, “Open, open.” She thinks that if they could just get the right vantage point, everything would become clear to them. But then the spell is broken. The fantastical figures approaching Rhoda and Louis resolve themselves into the shapes of their friends. The old questions—“What do I think of you?” and “Who am I”—begin to torment Louis again.
Rhoda quickly counters the men’s wishful thinking about timelessness with a reminder that nothing can stand in the way of death or the march of time. Once she had an epiphany about the way human beings try to imperfectly impose order on the chaos of existence—the square on the oblong—and she thinks that if she could just find a new vision she could understand everything else, too. But neither she nor readers can. While the book confidently asserts that there is an underlying order in the chaos, it nevertheless hints that the human mind will never be able to fully understand it.
Themes
Bernard and Neville realize that the spell has broken for them, too. Something special and inexpressible was in their grasp, but they lost it. Bernard suggests they stand for a moment beside the river, watching the lights come on in the city and imagining the lives teeming around them—lives of hope and distress, and quiet happinesses. He hears the engine of life itself (which sounds a lot like the approaching train)—and the chorus of humanity singing alongside the banks of the river. He hears these sounds even up to the moment when he boards the train bound for home and falls asleep, his ticket still clenched in his hand.
The way that the sounds of the city become superimposed and tangled up in Bernard’s thinking points to the uneven way the six friends reenter the flow of time and everyday life. It also reminds readers of the book’s ongoing assertion that important truths lie just below the surface of the observable world and that no observation is too small or mundane to be exempt from the possibility of revelation. Life, as Bernard experiences it here, is a grand chorus, like the birds in the garden or the music Rhoda listened to in the Music Hall—a song to which individual voices (individual lives) contribute, but which itself never ends.
Themes
