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Chapter 1
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
Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny, and Louis each describe the sights and sounds of the dawn as they experience them outside of the house where they all live. Then they hear Mrs. Constable (one of their caretakers) preparing breakfast and setting the table. Louis stands in the garden for a moment imagining himself as a plant, rooted in the ground and invisible to his friends. He is the last to go inside for breakfast. When the six friends go back outside after breakfast, Louis stands by the wall and watches Bernard, Susan, Neville, and Jinny catching butterflies in nets.
In the beginning of the book, the protagonists are all young children. As they describe what they notice around them, their individual impressions combine to give the reader a fuller sense of the morning. One reading of the book sees each of the six as projections or emanations of one consciousness, and the way it takes all six characters to describe the dawn supports this interpretation. But it’s also possible to interpret the six as individuals. In this case, it's notable how none of them can describe the dawn individually: they must work together, suggesting that their group possesses its own identity separate from—or in addition to—the characters’ individual identities.
Themes
Jinny leaves the others and finds Louis standing obscured in the bushes, so still that, for an instant, she thinks he might be dead. She kisses him to make sure. Unbeknownst to her or Louis, Susan observes the kiss through a gap in the hedge. She balls her handkerchief tightly in her hand and runs away, nearly in tears, to cry under the trees elsewhere on the estate. When she passes Bernard and Neville, busy carving boats out of wood, a concerned Bernard quietly follows her. He watches her throw herself down under the beech trees in the wood and weep.
The children’s actions speak for themselves and introduce their personalities to readers. Louis feels isolated within the group; Jinny is romantic; Susan is jealous. Bernard pays attention to what the others are doing, and he’s particularly interested in Susan. Jinny’s fear also introduces the idea of death into the book at the very roots of the protagonists’ lives.
Themes
Bernard’s hair is wild and untidy because instead of brushing it, he got distracted freeing a fly from a spiderweb. He watches as Susan calms down—even though she vows to herself she won’t forget her feelings of love or hatred. Bernard tries to draw her attention to their companionship and to the world around them. He imagines the group of friends as explorers, coming to Elvedon (a fairy-kingdom version of the house where they live) as if for the first time. At first, Susan sees what Bernard describes, but then his story trails off and she finds herself falling back in the real world.
Bernard, the storyteller, is already paying close attention to the world around him, mining it for details and impressions (like the spider’s web) that he can weave later into stories. To comfort Susan in her distress, Bernard does what he does best: he weaves a magical story. For a moment, it works, and Susan sees what he does. But he can’t maintain it or bring it to a satisfactory ending. This in turn suggests that a good story is harder to tell than one might assume.
Themes
Meanwhile, Rhoda has plucked petals from the flowers and dropped them into a basin of water. She swirls the water around, pretending the petals are boats at sea. Neville searches for Bernard, irritated that he ran off after Susan with the knife they’d been using to carve boats. Bernard’s changeability and inconstancy make Neville uncomfortable.
Rhoda doesn’t play with whole flowers, but with individual petals. Their dismemberment mirrors the way that Rhoda experiences life through discrete, often overwhelming impressions rather than as a cohesive flow of events. The petals also mirror the children in the garden, who have run off in different directions, following their own desires.
Themes
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The tutor, Miss Hudson, summons the children to their lessons. During Latin lesson, Louis frets about speaking because he’s Australian and his British friends mock his accent. He knows all the answers, and when he speaks, he tries to imitate Bernard’s voice. After Latin, Miss Hudson begins the math lesson, to Rhoda’s dismay. She can read the numbers Miss Hudson writes on the board but doesn’t know how to manipulate them. Everyone else solves their problems and turns in their work, while she just stares at the board, feeling as if she’s falling into the abyss that exists in the center of the zero.
The schoolroom gives readers insight into the insecurities of Louis and Rhoda. Louis grew up in Australia—still a colony of Great Britain during the time in which the book is set—and worries that he’s a second-class citizen because of this. He spends the lesson acutely conscious of differences that none of the other characters seem to notice, which raises the question of whether the discrimination he fears is real or imagined. The math lesson sends Rhoda into an existential crisis. She can make no more sense of the relationships between the parts of an equation than she can between the events and sensations of her life.
Themes
Released from their schoolwork, all the children go outside except Rhoda, who still has to finish the assignment. Louis watches her though the window while Bernard draws Jinny into a secret place in the bushes to play pretend. Jinny doesn’t participate in Bernard’s games the way Susan did. Jinny is practical and knows that it will soon be time for their afternoon walk. And eventually, the children will all grow up enough to go away to boarding schools.
Paying attention to the contrasts between the children help the reader develop a sense of their individual personalities. Louis and Rhoda stand apart from the group. Jinny looks toward the future and seems to be totally immune to Bernard’s stories. Readers should note these details now and see how they change or remain the same as the children grow.
Themes
Miss Curry (another of the children’s caretakers) blows her whistle, summoning Bernard, Louis, Susan, Rhoda, and Jinny for their walk. Sickly Neville stays behind. He ascends the stairs and stops on the spot where he was the previous night when he heard the servants talking about a murdered man found with his throat cut. He wants to recapture the frozen feeling the story gave him so that he can try to understand it.
Although Jinny worried that the still and silent Louis was dead, it’s Neville who truly introduces the idea of death into the otherwise idyllic world the young children occupy. He ruminates on story of the murdered man because he intuitively senses its importance even if he doesn’t yet have the context or life experience to fully understand it.
Themes
As the children return from their walk, Susan sees Florie and Ernest, two of the house’s servants, kissing in the kitchen garden amid the laundry billowing in the breeze on the lines. She feels powerful and alive as she eats her tea and observes her friends.
Another important human experience that the children don’t yet understand is sex, represented here by the stolen kisses Susan witnesses. If the first one—Jinny kissing Louis—inspired jealousy because it occasioned a division among the children, this one empowers Susan because it hints at experience she will have, too, when she grows older.
Themes
Later, Miss Curry leads the children in evening songs and prayers before sending all six upstairs to take their turns in the bathroom. Bernard loves taking a bath under the watchful eye of Mrs. Constable. In the warm water, he thinks back over the day and all its “rich and heavy sensations.”
Bernard has been collecting sensations and weaving stories from the beginning of the day when he saw the spider in the bedewed web. His delighted reaction to the bath further shows him to be a sensualist who pays attention to the impressions the world makes on him.
Themes
As Rhoda changes into her pajamas, she enters her private world, where she no longer wishes to be Susan or Jinny. She likes the delicious sense of floating and dissolving that relaxing into the mattress gives her, and she must touch her toes to the solid footboard to stay grounded in reality. She dreams about being in the garden when Mrs. Constable comes to fetch her so she can go home with her aunt. She tries to wake from the dream but can’t.
Rhoda attempts to copy her friends in a way that suggests she finds normal behavior baffling and unintuitive. While she finds comfort and respite in the sensation of dissolving and floating as she falls asleep, her act of touching her feet to the bottom of the bedframe to stay grounded insinuates that there’s danger in drifting too far apart from the currents of normal human experience. The chapter’s final lines position life itself as a dream from which she wants to wake—but can’t.
Themes
