The Orientation Of Identity In Virginia Woolf's The Waves

As one of the leading novelists in modernism, Virginia Woolf enjoys great reputation for her various literary perspectives and immense devotion to the experimentation in novel-writing. Virginia Woolf proposes that novels should reveal the inner side of people and challenges traditional writing techniques with intense innovation of stream-of-consciousness. She focuses on the psychological as well as emotional motives of characters, and on this account, most of her writing demands close scrutiny by its readers.The Waves, firstly published in 1931, is widely acknowledged as one of Virginia Woolf's most experimental, most difficult, and most original works. It is a beautifully stylized, poetical work that conveys the rhythm of life in synchrony with the cycle of nature and the passage of time. In pure stream-of-consciousness style, Virginia Woolf presents a panorama of multiple yet parallel lives.The Waves has been examined from various aspects by critics both at home and abroad since the day on which it was published. Various as the previous researches may be, none of them explored the orientation of identity from such philosophical aspects as the ontological approach and the existential approach systematically. Therefore, this thesis aims to track down how Virginia Woolf dramatizes the orientation of individual's identity in face of ontological loneliness, in the pursuit of existential order and how the individual endeavors convey Virginia Woolf's own misgivings about the overall human existence and condition.Chapter One, through several fragments from The Voyage Out, Mrs. Dalloway, and The Waves, analyzes why Virginia Woolf's characters lose their self in the fictional world. Virginia Woolf is powerfully attracted to life experiences and makes her style increasingly adapted to these experiences; thus Virginia Woolf's characters demonstrate a strong desire to embrace the world. In the process of embracing the outside world, the characters seem to lose their self and integrate into the outside world at large. They either feel in communion with the outside world, or yield an intense community with nature. Virginia Woolf wants her fiction to express how powerfully she is attracted to the life experience and how eager she is to seek the unity between the self and the life outside. Chapter Two is mainly concerned with how Virginia Woolf delves into the basic ontological question of what it means to be and how one goes about that business through individual depiction of specific characters. Haunted by this basic ontological question, the six characters attempt to find the answer in two distinctive ways. The first group, represented by Louis, Neville and Rhoda, try to establish their self by initiating a specific relation to a pure "other." However, out of their inherent defects, they cannot find the secure self to stand upon. The second group, represented by Bernard, guided by their creative will, challenge the ontological absurdity through a life-long scheme of heroic self-creation. Though temporarily dominated by a sense of nihilism, Bernard counterattacks it with enormous perseverance and unfolds the ontological mystery. He begins to see things as they should be and challenges death with his indomitable spirit.Chapter Three explores how the six characters look for some intelligible order out of typical existential chaos of sensation and impression. Virginia Woolf portrays the course of this pursuit through three paradoxes. Though order exists in the natural world as exhibited in the pastoral interludes, there is no such order as individuals can obtain in the real world. Frustrated yet undaunted, they resort to an icon, Percival; nevertheless, Percival cannot furnish a secure identity for everyone to refer to. His meaningless death in India makes his fellows realize the cruelty of chance and the uncertainty of existence. Disengaged from this icon, Bernard cuts a different way out: fumbling for order and meaning through phrase-making and artistic creation. However obsessed and assiduous he is, Bernard does not get hold of the order and meaning he has been aspiring after for his whole life. Bernard realizes language's inability to preserve a coherent identity and writing's futility to express meaning in an apparently chaotic world. He deserts them completely. Through Bernard's misgivings about his medium, Virginia Woolf gives voice to her own qualms over the medium as well.Virginia Woolf speculates on the collective rather than the individual aspects of identity. Her aim is to focus on the breaking down of conventional character and the impermeable boundaries of identity, of self and other, and of self and world. The Waves is an extraordinary attempt to construct an honest exploration of an irresolvable condition, the human condition.