Madness as Metaphysics: Schizophrenia and Narrative Fragmentation in Virginia Woolf's the Waves
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: In The Waves (1931), written by Virginia Woolf, the conventional narrative coherence is replaced with a fractured,polyphonic framework. This is similar to the perceptual and ontological dislocations that patients who suffer from schizophreniaexperience. The argument presented in this article is that Woolf's experimental form goes beyond the domain of basic stylisticinnovation in order to investigate the ephemeral nature of reality, identity, and time. The paper makes this claim by usingschizophrenia as a theoretical framework. Through the alignment of six protagonists' discontinuous soliloquies, Woolf reimaginesthe shattered consciousness that schizophrenics experience as a philosophical inquiry into reality. This is accomplished through theuse of the word "shattered consciousness." The novel's narrative fragmentation, which is characterized by shifting identities, nonlinear chronology, and linguistic collapse, is a reflection of the epistemological crisis that modernity is experiencing, which occurswhen Cartesian certainty is drowned in existential doubt. This research offers a novel reading of The Waves, which is a pioneeringcombination of psychological and philosophical topics. It does so by pulling from modernist theory, psychoanalysis, and continentalphilosophy. One can observe how Woolf's characters, particularly Rhoda and Bernard, represent the chaotic collapse of individualboundaries that allows for a paradoxical merger with the cosmic "waves" of existence by carefully reading the text on a more indepth level. By employing schizophrenia as a metaphor for the ontological disintegration of modernity, the study contends thatWoolf's formal experimentation destroys the illusion of coherence in story and human awareness. Specifically, the study focuses onthe phenomenon of schizophrenia.
Institution: University of Kufa
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W6930641906
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