The Waves
The most important symbol in The Waves is—surprise!—the wave. How important? At one point during composition of the novel, Woolf had settled upon “The Moths” as its title. During the writing process, she sensed that the novel’s thematic pattern of fluidity in the relations of character and the meaning of language was most ideally represented by the dual ability of waves to signify constancy and change within the same motion.
The Sun
Rather than separating the novel into chapters, each individual section is preceded by an italicized passage that the author refers to as “interludes.” One of the common bonds uniting each of these interludes is the sun rising across the sky during the course of a day. The symbolism here relates to the narrative telling of the chronological passage of time among a group of friends.
The Empty House
The empty house which the rising sun illuminates to makes things appear differently as the illumination increases is also a highly symbolic element of interludes. The empty house represents the enemy which described in the novel’s second-to-last line: “Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!’”
Percival
Percival is a different symbol for death. He is the only character who is not given one of the novel’s extended interior monologues for speaking. He is the character who actually dies. Percival is a figure who both stimulates cohesion as a group among the other characters and whose death also rips that cohesion apart. He is the living symbol of the consequences of the Bernard’s closing pronouncement: “Death is the enemy.”
The Soliloquies
The sections separated by those “interludes” are comprised of long interior monologues by each major character (except, as noted, Percival) referred to as soliloquies. These soliloquies create a strange situation for a novel in which characters are rarely portrayed engaged with each other through conventional passages of dialogue; instead, what appears to be conversation is really the recollection by the individual character during their soliloquy. Each of those individual recollections string together into a mostly linear narrative following a mostly chronological timeline, creating another odd sensation of reading a first person account told by a single character. All these technique coalesce to turn the structure of the novel into a symbol of its theme of the fluidity of relationship and meaning, consciousness and unconsciousness, male and female and multiple other aspects.
