A "Fluid" Stream-of-Consciousness
Using an entire aquarium's worth of water metaphors to describe the emotions of its characters, The Waves also brings its obsession with fluidity into its narrative style: stream-of-consciousness. Woolf writes in a way that has words and ideas flowing and cascading into one another, rising and falling in intensity… kind of like the ocean tides.
Take, for example, when Rhoda says she is riding a mule up a Spanish hill:
The mule stumbles up and on. The ridge of the hill rises like mist, but from the top I shall see Africa. Now the bed gives under me. The sheets spotted with yellow holes let me fall through. The good woman with a face like a white horse at the end of the bed makes a valedictory movement and turns to go. Who then comes with me? Flowers only, the cowbind and the moonlight-coloured May. Gathering them loosely in a sheaf I made of them a garland and gave them—Oh, to whom? We launch out now over the precipice. Beneath us lie the lights of the herring fleet. The cliffs vanish. Rippling small, rippling grey, innumerable waves spread beneath us. I touch nothing. I see nothing. We may sink and settle on the waves. The sea will drum in my ears. The white petals will be darkened with sea water. They will float for a moment and then sink. Rolling me over the waves will shoulder me under. Everything falls in a tremendous shower, dissolving me. (7b, 40)
In this big ol' mess of stream-of-consciousness, a whole bunch of thoughts and images collide and flow together in Rhoda's head. Rhoda's narrative of her ascent on the mule gathers intensity before ultimately "dissolving," kind of like the waves she's describing. Yeah, Woolf is a genius. It's true.
Another prime example of the narrative's wavy ways occurs at the very end, when Bernard's depression lifts and he declares his intention to keep on resisting death and decline:
And in me too the wave rises. It swells; it arches its back. I am aware once more of a new desire, something rising beneath me like the proud horse whose rider first spurs and then pulls him back. What enemy do we now perceive advancing against us, you whom I ride now, as we stand pawing this stretch of pavement? It is death. Death is the enemy. It is death against whom I ride with my spear couched and my hair flying back like a young man's, like Percival's, when he galloped in India. I strike spurs into my horse. Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death! (9b.84)
Again, this moment builds kind of like a wave gathering strength, showing off the narrative rhythms that Woolf uses throughout the novel. With the somewhat out-of-the-blue reference to Percival, Bernard's zesty declaration is a good example of the way seemingly random thoughts or references often intrude on—or flow into—a stream-of-consciousness narrative. And, you know, our own organic patterns of thought: which is what stream-of-consciousness is modeled on.
Between several gallons of water references and narrative rhythms that mimic the rising and falling of waves, we don't think the term "stream-of-consciousness" has ever been so apt. As they say, it's not the size of The Waves, but the motion of its ocean, er, prose.