The Inner Tides: The Stream of Consciousness and Subjectivity in “The Waves”

Abstract

The Waves is Virginia Woolf’s most experimental work and one of the most accessible novels written by any modernist novelist. Stated fully in soliloquies The Waves (1931) is well-known as one of the hardest novels of Virginia Woolf. Woolf’s creations require a deep concentration as they are not plain narratives. The profoundness of her narrative and the keenness of her descriptions simply blow the minds of the readers. The Waves charts the psychology of the six narrators and present what is going on in the minds of these characters. Virginia Woolf uses the stream of consciousness technique and delves into the inner thoughts and sensory perceptions of her characters. Although Dorothy Richardson is the first British modernist novelist who used this technique in her novel but Virginia Woolf the one who excelled this technique to another level.