Woolf and Joyce
contrasted starkly at the beginning of chapter 5: ‘ He drained his third cup of watery tea to the dregs. ’ The semantic field of filth – ‘ dregs ’ , ‘ boghole ’ , ‘ turfcoloured ’ ‘ greasy ’ – invokes a disconcerting bathos, undermining completely the epiphanic ecstasy of the previous chapter. This creates in a reader a distrust in the certainty of Stephen’s epiphanies, and therefore, as Stephen reaches his final epiphany of the novel, that he must leave Ireland to ‘ forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race ’ , the confidence in the character that typifies the close of a typical Bildungsroman is lost. The reader cannot believe that Stephen will go on from here in a constant progress, and realize his dreams. He is condemned in our minds to be bound forever to this cycle of epiphany and collapse, unable to realize the visions of life provided to him in his moments of transcendence. In The Waves , the cycles of life are represented in conjunction with those of the natural world through a series of images and motifs. Throughout the novel, the narrative of the six characters is interrupted by interstitial sections which describe the development of a day in richly symbolic, poetic language. The cycle of the sun rising, reaching its apex, and setting, corresponds with the childhood, maturity, and approach towards death of the characters. The sun’s presence does not only symbol ize life and death, but the light it casts represents wisdom and maturity. These cycles of light and dark reveal something of Woolf in the novel. Beginning with the death of Woolf’s mother when she was only 13, Woolf suffered mood swings throughout her life, and a number of mental breakdowns, the last of which caused her to take her own life in 1941. The imagery of brightness and shadow in this novel reflect something of the extreme contrasts that existed within Woolf herself. As the book ends, Bernard walks out from a bright restaurant into the dark night, and seems to be ready to face death: ‘ Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death! ’ His readiness to face death reflects that he finds comfort in the cycles of life, affirming, ‘ Yes, this is the eternal renewal, the incessant rise and fall and fall and rise again. ’ He accepts that all life is part of this cycle, and that death is an inevitable part of that. Another key symbol in the novel is that of birds. Their activities represent the phases of human life the characters go through. At the opening of the book ‘ One bird chirped high up; there was a pause, another chirped lower down ’ . These tentative chirpings reflect the gradual beginnings of self- expression in the characters. By the time the characters have left school, ‘ In the garden the birds that had sung erratically and spasmodically in the dawn on that tree, on that bush, now sang together in chorus ’ . Their singing together ‘ in chorus ’ represents a satisfaction, a sense of having developed an understanding of the seemingly random ‘ erratic ’ occurrences of life into a harmonious unity. However, the book’s continuing cycle cannot allow this satisfaction to remain, and by the end of the novel, ‘ a bird chirps ’ , alone, unaccompanied by the songs of others, the harmony of life lost, and events once again random and solitary. The final, and most important motif is that of waves. They represent not the internal cycles of life, the highs and lows, epiphanies and moments of helplessness of the characters; rather, the immitigable flow of the waves, consistent despite the continually shifting perceptions of the world in the rest of the novel, represents a cycle more primordial, more eternal. The final words of the novel are ‘ The waves broke on the shore ’ . This simple, one-clause sentence undermines the heroic determination of Bernard’s final thoughts, and more broadly, the eloquence of the entire novel. This represents the indifference of the inevitable cycles of the earth to human preoccupations; regardless of how greatly their perceptions of the world shift, they cannot change what is fundamental: that they will live, they will die, and after their death, the cycles of the world will continue.
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