Is life pieces or is life whole? Is life: bubbles – fragments – half-finished sentences – elm trees – women writing – “the moment in its ring of light” – pages with comments in the margin – wreckage – flotsam / jetsam – Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday?
Or is life: a rushing stream – a cauldron – a globe – a dream – a “plain and logical story” – a machine?
(In the novel there are more words for pieces than for the whole, but it is in the nature of pieces to be many different things.)
Furthermore, are we separate and different people or am I also you? Is this “identity we so feverishly cherish” not our own at all? Is Bernard actually Percival, Neville, Louis, Ginny, Susan and Rhoda as well as himself?
I think this is the theme with which Woolf’s great masterwork tussles. (Leonard came out into the garden and told Virginia that The Waves was a masterpiece on the morning of 19th July 1931.)
The tussle is valiant and beautiful. Out of it come freedom and boldness, the sound of the sea and the birds, heat and currency, rhythm and ardour (Woolf’s words). Out of it comes an experience for the common reader that rearranges the mind like no other (my words).
Is life the sea, or is life one wave after another?
In the final paragraph Bernard vows to fling himself at death – everything of him will be angled toward and against it in one bright spear. His hair will be flying behind him. Perhaps the moment of death will bring everything together.
He will gallop fearlessly, just as Percival fearlessly galloped in India and seems to be galloping still.
we have scarcely broken into our hoard 