The Waves and the Self Anonymous 12th Grade

‘Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousnesses’

Above is an extract taken from Virginia Woolf’s influential essay ‘Modern Fiction’, in which she argues for a new way of presenting experience and reality in the novel. Simultaneously a defence of her unique style, the essay works to develop a theory of realism, and establishes the relationship between art and the real world in the new conditions of the 1920s. Woolf, as one of the most prominent figures in literary modernism, created works which became renowned for their distinctive narrative method, particularly characterised by her use of the stream-of-consciousness mode. The Waves, published in 1931, arguably Woolf’s most poetical work, particularly adopts this device. Described by Woolf as a ‘playpoem’, throughout the work the sense of genre seems almost to dissolve, and the border between prose and poetry to blur. It is this fluidity of language which enables Woolf to present and detail ‘the self’ in such an extraordinary way, as the present thoughts of consciousness are captured and evocatively...