Woolf’s choice to use the word “said” rather than “thought” or “said to herself” is significant: it implies that these interior monologues are being said to someone or for someone other than the speaker. But to whom? The reader, perhaps, or possibly the other characters. The latter seems possible when paired with observations made by Julia Briggs, author of Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life. She notes that there are moments in the novel when “even though their monologues are silent, the characters seem to reach each other through them, at times speaking in chorus”^[6]. She mentions a particular point in the novel when all six characters come together to say goodbye to a mutual friend, Percival, who is about to leave for India. In this section, the characters’ monologues become choric in the sense that they take turns describing the same moment, with one character starting where the previous had left off. Louis says, “the circle in our blood … closes in a ring. Something is made.” The characters go on to describe what is within this something, this ring:

Rhoda and Neville (and the other characters in turn) are referring to the ring image Louis introduced. The reader would not know to what the “it” in the other characters’ monologues referred without Louis’ monologue. Here, the characters come together to describe something they are making collectively.

In the final chapter, the tension between isolation and communion becomes magnified, both within the thoughts of the character(s) and what happens to the form. In this chapter, Bernard, the character that loves telling stories and aspired to be a writer when young, attempts to sum up all that takes place in the course of the novel. It is the only chapter in The Waves in which only one character speaks, fully isolating Bernard from the others, and yet somehow Bernard “sweeps [the other characters] into his own consciousness”^[7] speaking for and as all of them, and the boundaries between characters and individual identities become very unclear:

The tension between isolation and connection is amplified to an extreme in this final chapter, as the boundaries between the characters are dissolved and then reinstated in Bernard’s final soliloquy. The tension is left unresolved.

In Umberto Eco’s work, The Limits of Interpretation (1994) he offers a way of thinking about imagined worlds in his “Possible Worlds Theory.” According to Eco, possible worlds are worlds constructed by human beings, excluding that which we understand to be the “real” world. These possible worlds have their own set of rules that may or may not differ from the rules of the “real” world. In fiction, all possible worlds are necessarily “incomplete and semantically unhomogeneous: they are handicapped and small worlds,” meaning not every aspect of the possible world is explained for the reader. The reader is supposed to be flexible and superficial, accepting the world as it is explained and filling in the unexplained gaps with knowledge of the rules of the “real” world.

In fiction, all possible worlds are necessarily ‘incomplete and semantically unhomogeneous: they are handicapped and small worlds,’ meaning not every aspect of the possible world is explained for the reader.

Eco outlines three types of small worlds that may exist in fiction. First, there are small worlds that appear verisimilar, where the rules of the world coincide with the rules of the “real” world. Next, small worlds that are possible but nonverisimilar. As an example of this, he mentions stories in which animals can speak: impossible in the “real” world, but easily imaginable and conceivable with a certain amount of flexibility on the part of the reader. Finally, Eco mentions worlds that are inconceivable, worlds that “… however possible or impossible they may be — are in any case beyond our powers of conception, because their alleged individuals or properties violate our logical or epistemological habits…”

Various aspects of the world of The Waves correlate with each of these types of small worlds. The plot is entirely verisimilar: the characters grow up, get jobs, marry, have children, age and die, operating by the same rules as the rules of the “real” world. The fact that the characters can “hear” and respond to one another’s inner thoughts at times falls into the realm of a nonverisimilar world: while in “the real world,” telepathy may be considered impossible, it is certainly not inconceivable. However, in order to understand the complexities of the final chapter, and furthermore, the novel as a whole, it is necessary to think of it in terms of inconceivable worlds (which Eco also calls impossible possible worlds). In The Waves’ final chapter, when Bernard is somehow simultaneously all six characters and still himself, a man sitting at a coffee shop, the reader is presented with an inconceivable reality that is difficult if not impossible to imagine.