The Waves Characters

Have you ever had a friend who just can't let there be a lag in conversation? Who's always talking to strangers while you're trying to have a quiet coffee with him? That's Bernard. From the time he...

Neville begins the novel as a sensitive, delicate child who is not allowed to exercise with the other children because it will exhaust him too much. We never really learn what makes him so delicate...

Aussie Louis is a bit of outsider in this odd group of six. He's the son of an Australian banker and jeepers does he reference that fact a lot; "My father is a banker in Brisbane" is The Waves vers...

Susan is kind of the "earth mother" figure in this crowd. To say that Susan is a nature-lover would be an understatement. Even compared to the other narrators, who are all pretty nature-oriented, S...

If Rhoda is the character who lives most in her mind, Jinny is the one who lives most in her body. She revels in sensualism and physicality, and she spends a lot of her narration celebrating her bo...

Of the six character narrations, Rhoda's is decidedly the most abstract… and just like you know things are going to be uber-experimental when we say "The Waves is Woolf's most experimental novel,...

The beloved friend of our six narrators, Percival never gets a chance to speak for himself, but his presence looms super large throughout the novel. If his friends are to be believed, the sun rises...

Dr. Crane is the headmaster of the boarding school that Louis, Neville, Bernard, and Percival attend. He is a consummate figure of authority and Louis loves him. But Neville calls Crane a "brute" w...

These are a group of boys that Neville, Louis, Bernard, and Percival attend boarding school with. They're rich, athletic, and popular. Think Mean Girls, but with a group of English lads. On Wednesd...