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Chapter 8
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
At its full height, the narrator says, the sun is “uncompromising and undeniable.” It exposes all that it touches in exact detail. Midday is the time for work, when women wash clothing in the river and men guide cargo-laden mules along the lanes. The sunlight falls on the workers and the fields, the cultivated and wild places of England equally, illuminating and warming everything. In the garden, the flowers burst into profuse blooms as the birds cease their love songs and begin to weave together nests out of twigs. The sunlight makes the white exterior walls of the house shine brightly, while light and shadow vie for mastery of the rooms. The waves break swiftly on the shore “like a great beast stamping.”
The midday light exposes everything it touches; readers can expect that the next chapter will see the six friends’ mettle tested by the trials and tribulations of their adult lives. Notably, it’s at this moment that shadows appear in the interior of the house. While the bright sunlight still mostly holds them at bay, an awareness of death’s immanence has crept into the novel. It’s no longer something that happens to unnamed strangers, as in Chapter 2. The alarming stamping beast that one can hear in the waves also suggests death. This image ties to the white figure Rhoda saw on the shores of India in Chapter 8, as well as echoing the words Louis used to describe the sound of the waves both in Chapter 2 and in Chapter 8.
Themes
