Eco goes on to discuss interpretation as it relates to these worlds. According to him, a text may be interpreted semantically or critically. In a semantic interpretation, the reader reads a text and “fills it up with a given meaning,” responding to the text on a primarily affective level. A critical interpretation is “a metalinguistic activity which aims at describing and explaining for which formal reasons a given text produces a given response.” Any fictional text is capable of being interpreted either semantically or critically, but only certain texts incite a desire for critical interpretation. Texts that offer “both the illusion of a coherent world and the feeling of some inexplicable impossibility” on the semantic level do just this.

After a first read of The Waves, the reader is indeed left with “both the illusion of a coherent world and the feeling of some inexplicable impossibility,” thus encouraging the reader to explore the novel further and interpret it critically. On further investigation, one finds that the “inexplicable impossibility,” Bernard as simultaneously one person and every person in the final chapter, is ambiguous because Bernard himself is not sure of his identity: “Am I all of them? Am I one and distinct? I do not know”^[8]. Bernard’s wavering understanding of himself leaves open the possibility that he is one, many, or both at once.

Something that adds to the ambiguity of this last chapter is the particular form of the novel: it “stand[s] further back from life,” giving “the outline rather than the detail” in the way in which a piece of poetry has the freedom to do.^[9] Therefore, the world of The Waves is an open possible-impossible world, leaving room for contradictions to exist simultaneously. Thus, the reader must accept that in the world of the novel, the characters are somehow impossibly separated as individuals and intrinsically connected as fluctuating parts of a whole in a way that is unique to The Waves.

“It gives me … a great delight to put the severed parts together.”^[10]

Imagine a scene of orderly chaos. Ensemble members, dressed in black, move swiftly around the space. Center stage, a woman sits on a long table. She has just thrown on a button down, collared shirt over her black tank top. As she stares down into the lens of a camera, held by a fellow actor, another actor waves a large piece of cardboard, creating a breeze that gently blows her hair off her face. Two other actors stand behind her, holding a large blue board. Downstage right and left, other actors stand; one holds an upturned bell and slowly runs a violin bow over it, creating a muffled, otherworldly sound, as if heard in water; another makes seagull sounds into a microphone; a third recites the following text from The Waves:

On a large screen upstage center, these various pieces come together to produce an image of a woman standing on the edge of a cliff by the sea on a bright blue day, looking down at the waves, contemplating and fearing its beauty, its indifference. The woman leans forward and disappears from the screen, but the actress can still be seen onstage, ripping off her collared shirt and preparing to perform a new task. On the screen, the woman is alone, isolated, lost in thought. On the stage, she is a part of an ensemble, a dancer in a complex dance, a single bee in a swarm, working collectively, chaotically, rhythmically.