Water

Given the title of The Waves, it should be no surprise that waves and water are symbolically huge in this novel. The novel's very style (which is even called stream-of-consciousness—how perfect is that?) mimics the flow of waves, and the characters describe a lot of emotional waxing and waning in a way that resembles the rhythm of the ocean.

Woolf draws special attention to tidal rhythms and their relationship to other cyclical processes (the 24-hour day and the four seasons) in the italicized introductions that start off each chapter. For Woolf, watery rhythms are reminiscent of The Circle of Life.

Woolf's metaphors go in both directions. On the one hand, waves and water are consistently anthropomorphized. For example, in one of the chapter intros, the narrator compares the waves to warriors:

The wind rose. The waves drummed on the shore, like turbaned warriors, like turbaned men with poisoned assegais who, whirling their arms on high, advance upon the feeding flocks, the white sheep. (3a.6)

On the other hand, taking the metaphor in the exact opposite direction, the behaviors of humans and animals are compared to flowing water. When the six narrators and Percival meet up before Percival's departure for India, the friends share some intense emotions that Louis compares to currents:

But now the circle breaks. Now the current flows. Now we rush faster than before. Now passions that lay in wait down there in the dark weeds which grow at the bottom rise and pound us with their waves. Pain and jealousy, envy and desire, and something deeper than they are, stronger than love and more subterranean. (4b.74)

Through use of these two-way metaphors and a lyrically "fluid" style, Woolf underscores how blurry the divisions between seemingly distinct categories/people/objects can be. If waves can be like people and people can be like waves, it's totally possible that the six main narrators may be one person.