Experimental Identities: Quantum Physics in Popular Science Writing and Virginia Woolf’s The Waves

Abstract

Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1931) is a novel about the impossibility of defining identity. Throughout the novel, the six main characters utter soliloquies in which they employ image after image to define their own beings and experiences, the very profusion of the images indicating the impossibility of the task. Each image is succeeded by another, and none is final. At the end of the novel, one of the characters, Bernard, engages in an attempt to “sum up” (191) his life, but finds that he cannot do it, for the simple reason that his life is inseparable from those of the people around him: