Narrators/ Protagonists (group of friends):
Bernard: A warm, introspective, talkative person who believes in the perfection of expression to connect people, causing him to gain the most insight about each character’s lives.
Neville: An empathetic, poetically artistic, upper-class intellect who falls in love with one of the minor character: Percival and later, he becomes a famous poet.
Louis: A lower-class Australian who is an outsider among the group, causing him to be self-conscious, driving him to be a successful businessman who was also Rhoda’s lover for a period of time.
Susan: A nature-oriented person who cannot tolerate the city life, causing her to move back to her family’s …show more content…
Ex. Louis: a steel ring of clear poetry that shall connect the gulls and the women with bad teeth, the church spire and the bobbing billycock hats (4.41)
Since Louis believes in the perfection of expression, he uses “steel ring” to draw connections to unsimilar objects.
Water: The flow and tide of water represents the stages and rhythm of the human life. The fluidity of water demonstrates how life is elusive and that it flows like the tidal rhythms.
Ex. But now the circle breaks. Now the current flows. Now we rush faster than before. Now passions that lay in wait down there in the dark weeds which grow at the bottom rise and pound us with their waves. Pain and jealousy, envy and desire, and something deeper than they are, stronger than love and more subterranean. (4.74)
Before Percival’s departure to India, the group share their feelings and Louis compares that moment to adulthood to a current since life continues to flow.
Two to three sentences on …show more content…
How does it further the plot or develop the characters? How does it help convey the universal theme?
The pivotal scene in The Waves is when the six narrators learn of Percival’s death. They learned that he fell from his horse in India and instantly died. They are anguished, striking each individual to come into terms of death and mortality. Percival’s premature death interrupts each narrator’s lives since Percival was seen as an inspiration and leader in their lives, causing them to go into fits of depression and changing their way of life. Each reacts differently, Louis engages himself in business and poetry, Neville resorts to poetry and having multiple affairs, Rhoda commits suicide, Jinny decides to live every moment freely and happily, Susan tries to live her life as happily as possible, and Bernard gains insight on how death has stricken each one of them. Since childhood, each narrator has obsessed over death and mortality, but it is inchoate, unlike losing a close friend, where you start to grasp that death is erratic and ubiquitous, altering one’s way of living; infancy to