Traumatic Experience in Virginia Woolf's The Waves

Abstract

This research examines the six character's trauma and their failure in almost all aspects of life deep-rooted in their present world. This research, reading Woolf's The Waves, engages itself in analyzing how the six characters undergo trauma and construct their identity in relation to each other. Specifically, it shows grief, pain and suffering of characters which they lament on the death of Percival one of the characters and sustain their life in memory of the past. The Waves symbolically denotes the mental waves constructed in the present life. In addition, Woolf shows the troublesome life of characters and their relevance to accept the reality of life. Applying trauma theory, the research has explored how all characters are victimization of trauma which they develop in their mind in relation to memory. In short, this thesis examining both the mental suffering of characters and the consequence of the extreme misery concludes that the characters suffer from the memory of trauma.