If there is a climax there also have to be duller sections and periods of build up and return. I think in general there needs to be rhythm in works of fiction. It just felt like too much to be submerged in this stream for 300 straight pages. While there are priceless gems scattered throughout the whole book after 50 or 100 pages it becomes a bit repetitive and tedious and I found myself longing for the surface. However, it is difficult to sustain for 300 pages. One learns a lot about oneself reading this book. Woolf has set herself the task of describing six lives from the standpoint of this stream which can never truly be captured in language and the novel is at times revelatory. Yet it is alive too and deep, this stream" (255-256). Late in the novel Woolf has a character muse on the blurry outlines of our everyday consciousness where there is a "rushing stream of broken dreams, nursery rhymes, street cries, half-finished sentences and sights.There is nothing one can fish up in a spoon nothing one can call an event. For the first 50 or 100 pages of The Waves I was enthralled.
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