The Waves E-Book

Virginia Woolf

• Herausgeber: LVL Editions
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Bernard is a story-teller, always seeking some elusive and apt phrase. Some critics see Woolf's friend E. M. Forster as an inspiration for him.Louis is an outsider who seeks acceptance and success. Some critics see in him aspects of T. S. Eliot, whom Woolf knew well.Neville, who may be partly based on another of Woolf's friends, Lytton Strachey, seeks out a series of men, each of whom becomes the present object of his transcendent love.Jinny is a socialite whose world view corresponds to her physical, corporeal beauty. There is evidence that she is based on Woolf's friend Mary Hutchinson.Susan flees the city, preferring the countryside, where she grapples with the thrills and doubts of motherhood. Some aspects of Susan recall Woolf's sister Vanessa Bell.Rhoda is riddled with self-doubt and anxiety, always rejecting and indicting human compromise, always seeking out solitude. She echoes Shelley's poem "The Question" (paraphrased: I shall gather my flowers and present them — O! to whom?). Rhoda resembles Virginia Woolf in some respects.Percival, partly based on Woolf's brother, Thoby Stephen, is the god-like but morally flawed hero of the other six. He dies midway through the novel, while engaged on an imperialist quest in British-dominated colonial India. Percival never speaks on his own in The Waves, but readers learn about him in detail as the other six characters repeatedly describe and reflect on him.The novel follows its six narrators from childhood through adulthood. Woolf is concerned with the individual consciousness and the ways in which multiple consciousnesses can weave together.

Leseprobe

Virginia Woolf

The Waves

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Table of contents

The Waves

The Waves

The sun had not yet risen. The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it. Gradually as the sky whitened a dark line lay on the horizon dividing the sea from the sky and the grey cloth became barred with thick strokes moving, one after another, beneath the surface, following each other, pursuing each other, perpetually.

As they neared the shore each bar rose, heaped itself, broke and swept a thin veil of white water across the sand. The wave paused, and then drew out again, sighing like a sleeper whose breath comes and goes unconsciously. Gradually the dark bar on the horizon became clear as if the sediment in an old wine-bottle had sunk and left the glass green. Behind it, too, the sky cleared as if the white sediment there had sunk, or as if the arm of a woman couched beneath the horizon had raised a lamp and flat bars of white, green and yellow spread across the sky like the blades of a fan. Then she raised her lamp higher and the air seemed to become fibrous and to tear away from the green surface flickering and flaming in red and yellow fibres like the smoky fire that roars from a bonfire. Gradually the fibres of the burning bonfire were fused into one haze, one incandescence which lifted the weight of the woollen grey sky on top of it and turned it to a million atoms of soft blue. The surface of the sea slowly became transparent and lay rippling and sparkling until the dark stripes were almost rubbed out. Slowly the arm that held the lamp raised it higher and then higher until a broad flame became visible; an arc of fire burnt on the rim of the horizon, and all round it the sea blazed gold.

The light struck upon the trees in the garden, making one leaf transparent and then another. One bird chirped high up; there was a pause; another chirped lower down. The sun sharpened the walls of the house, and rested like the tip of a fan upon a white blind and made a blue finger-print of shadow under the leaf by the bedroom window. The blind stirred slightly, but all within was dim and unsubstantial. The birds sang their blank melody outside.

‘I see a ring,’ said Bernard, ‘hanging above me. It quivers and hangs in a loop of light.’

‘I see a slab of pale yellow,’ said Susan, ‘spreading away until it meets a purple stripe.’

‘I hear a sound,’ said Rhoda, ‘cheep, chirp; cheep chirp; going up and down.’