The Waves is obsessed with the passing of time. Its structure certainly points this theme out with a bright yellow highlighter; each chapter pairs the characters' reflections during a particular stage of life with chapter intros that describe a landscape at a particular stage of the day. The landscape passes from morning (paired with childhood) to nighttime (paired with old age). It ain't hard to figure out the correlation here. Which is nice, actually, because it's so hard to figure out a bunch of this novel.
Questions About Time
- Why link the stages of life to the stages of the 24-hour day? What does this comparison achieve?
- How would you compare the way the different narrators think about time and its passage?
- How do the novel's preoccupations with time and language intersect?
Chew on This
Rhoda is the novel's quintessential outsider figure, living to a certain extent beyond the time of the clock. The abstract style of her narrative voice is an expression of her reliance on the "time of the mind."
By comparing the progress of the characters' lives to 24-hour time, the novel underscores that life as a process whose progress is both linear and circular.