LIKE PERCIVAL : The Waste Land Motifs in The Waves

Louis in The Waves is modeled on T. S. Eliot. That is clear when we see his neat, precise manner and appearance. His monologues show that he thinks the time past is contained in the time present, and that he can identify himself with a plant. His sense of time is very similar to the one in "Tradition and the Individual Talent". His fantasy is like that of The Golden Bough to which The Waste Land refers. The Waves has a number of images and motifs taken directly and indirectly from The Waste Land. The central figure of the novel is Percival, whose name and character remind us of the Knight of the Holy Grail. When he starts for India, the goal of his travel is to pursue the Grail. When he dies, the pursuit is taken over by Bernard, the novelist, who completes his novel at the end of the story when he can identify himself with Percival. His novel is his Holy Grail. Bernard's novel is written with cries and monosyllabic words, and represents his six friends' lives as well as his own as a whole. His novel is Virginia Woolf's ideal novel, which must be simple and saturated like poetry and must contain everything like a novel. She completed her novel by letting Bernard complete his novel, for the ideal is ideal and cannot be real. When T. S. Eliot wrote The Waste Land he was experiencing death of the heart. Woolf and the members of the Bloomsbury Group knew that and they thought the poem was "Tom's" autobiography. Woolf also experienced a kind of death, and she wrote this novel in order to be resurrected. The Waves is the autobiography of Virginia Woolf as a novelist