The Beat of the Waves

I realized over the course of reading for Tuesday that while we’ve discussed the significance of the italicized sections quite frequently, we have yet to discuss the importance of the waves themselves. In every one of the italicized portions of The Waves, the narrator makes mention of the “concussion” (78) of the waves falling upon the shore. The imagery used to describe them is consistently violent (possibly reflective of the relationships between the characters themselves) and always, always constant.

                A number of people have mentioned that the sun’s passage over the length of the day described in the italicized sections serves as a measurement of time that relates directly to the lives of the six characters featured in the story. I absolutely agree, but I also wonder if the metaphor can’t be taken a little bit further.  I think the waves serve as an additional mode of measurement, complementing the more temporal metaphor of the sun as it relates to the characters. The waves are a beat, a constancy that provides the meter for this story that focuses so much on the poetic. Woolf once thought to call this novel Playpoem, and it stands that in that sense, there is no meter but that of the waves.