The Waves by Virginia Woolf

But to myself I am immeasurable; a net whose fibres pass imperceptibly beneath the world.  My net is almost indistinguishable from that which it surrounds.  It lifts whales--huge leviathans and white jellies, what is amorphous and wandering; I detect, I perceive.  Beneath my eye opens--a book; I see to the bottom; the heart--I see to the depths.  I know what loves are trembling into fire; how jealousy shoots its green flashes hither and thither; how intricately love crosses love; love makes knots; love brutally tears them apart.  I have been knotted; I have been torn apart.

The Waves is the story of six people, three women and three men, from their childhood to their old age.  Bernard is in love with words, and is always seeking to make "phrases"; Neville is a gay man who yearns for a perfect love with a single person; Louis is an Australian anxious about being an outsider; Rhoda is full of anxiety; Susan loves the countryside and becomes a mother; Jinny is a beautiful socialite who loves admiration.

All that's true, but it hardly gives you a sense of what The Waves is, as a novel, if it is a novel and not some sort of extended prose poem or neo-Greek play.  I'm tempted to say that it's structured like a Greek chorus, but the chorus speaks in unison and the characters of The Waves speak in individual voices, one after the other.  It resembles, rather, the forms of strophe and antistrophe, when the chorus splits into parts who speak one after the other while turning on the stage.  Nothing happens in The Waves that's not filtered by a particular consciousness.  Everything is figured as speech by one of these six characters, who go on for paragraphs or pages, all with their own obsessions and needs, but each with Woolf's characteristically abstracted voice.  These speeches are punctuated by scenes, reminiscent of the middle part of To the Lighthouse, describing a seashore landscape from dawn to dusk.

There is another principal character: Percival, a school friend beloved by the six, who ends up dying in India when he's thrown by a horse.  We are treated to the individual griefs of each character, which are elegiac and beautiful, but Percival never gets a voice of his own.  Partly, maybe, because the image he represents--the genial imperialist, the world conqueror, the carrier of the white man's burden--doesn't permit an interiority.  The world of Percival, Woolf suggests, has passed away; in its place is the modern world and modern literature, which are reduced to the interior mind only.

The big theme of The Waves is how individual people--consciousnesses, personalities--become separate from humanity generally.  It's in the central image of the wave, which appears out of the unindividuated sea, only to break on the shore.  (The breaking is death, obviously.)  (And I suspect, though I'm not 100% sure the historical context allows it, that Woolf is alluding to scientific waves, which move through a medium but are not themselves the medium--is a person a movement through the field of humanity?)  Toward the end, Bernard, now an old man, muses,

And now I ask, 'Who am I?'  I have been talking of Bernard, Neville, Jinny, Susan, Rhoda, and Louis.  Am I all of them?  Am I one and distinct?  I do not know.  We sat here together.  But now Percival is dead; and Rhoda is dead; we are divided; we are not here.  Yet I cannot find any obstacle separating us.  There is no division between me and them.

The Waves is really a beautiful book.  It breaks all the rules, as great literature often does: it's so ensconced in each of these individual consciousnesses that it traffics in very little plot, detail, setting.  It wouldn't work if Woolf weren't such an expert in representing consciousness with images, providing it with a kind of specificity and solidity that eludes other writers.  Even Joyce couldn't represent the inner consciousness as faithfully or convincingly.  Woolf understood the source of human loneliness, and how it can exist even in a crowd, but what's more, she knew the words to explain it.  That's really something.