Modern Voices: Challenges to the Linear Narrative in 'The Waves' and 'The Idea of Order at Key West' Anonymous College

For the modernists, the linear narrative was something of a constraint on the writer’s ability to express their ideas and perceptions of the world. To discard the linear narrative, therefore, seemed the most logical solution to this problem. As Virginia Woolf writes in her 1925 essay ‘Modern Fiction’:

‘[The modernists] attempt to come closer to life, and to preserve more sincerely and exactly what interests and moves them, even if to do so they must discard most of the conventions which are commonly observed by the novelist.’[1]

In her novel The Waves, Woolf follows her own advice, abandoning linear narrative and the traditional use of authorial voice so as to provide a distinct and wholly unique vision of life. This discarding of linear narrative is something also done by the poet Wallace Stevens, who, in his poems ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’ and ‘The Idea of Order at Key West’, presents a form defined by multiple perspectives and dissonance.

In The Waves Virginia Woolf utilizes the musical device of polyphony so as to disrupt linear narrative and provide a form of language that accurately portrays her interpretation of human consciousness and experience of the physical world. Polyphony, which is the layering of...