‘Now to sum up …’ Bernard's resigned tone as he surveys the hopeless nature of his task carries its warning to the critic. Attempts to ‘interpret’ The Waves, in the sense of tracing the ‘one true story’ of the book, are fated to come to grief – here character and reader are one. The work has been purposely designed to frustrate the enterprise it invites, which is perhaps one of the most critically interesting things about it.

Our examination of The Waves has repeatedly touched upon what may well seem the most obvious feature of the book – that is, the difficulty of taking bearings within its too-fluent texture. There is no doubt that this was a highly deliberate effect. Throughout the latter stages of composition, Virginia Woolf indicated that she was writing to a ‘rhythm’, and of course this could only be ‘the rhythm of the waves’ (20 Aug. 1930). The change of title from The Moths was not fortuitous, but rather an ‘essential’ clarification; the ‘rhythm’ she wished to sound through the book was the systole – diastole movement of the waves, the repeated pattern of surge and ebb. We have seen, throughout this analysis, some of the ways in which that pattern manifests itself: realism and ‘reality’, process and meaning, life and art, narrative and plot, personality and impersonality, the individual and the group, speaker and interlude, sensitive and insensitive nature, the mind and the sun, the flowing ‘stream’ of life and meditative ‘islands of light’ – all of these dualities meet and contend in the book.