Symbolism, Imagery, Allegory
Who doesn't like flowers? They're pretty, they smell good, and they attract friendly bees. Oh, and they're hugely symbolic: just check out Georgia O'Keeffe sometime.
After water and waves, flowers are probably the most important symbols in The Waves—they're everywhere. Dead, alive, getting blasted by the breeze, being twisted into garlands, landing in the river as an "offering"—you name a scene in the book, and flowers (or someone who is like a flower) are probably nearby.
One important use of this symbol occurs in the repeated image of a many-sided flower, which seems to be a metaphor for the seven friends themselves. When the six narrators and Percival gather together for a last dinner before Percival heads to India, Bernard looks around the restaurant and spies a red carnation in a nearby vase:
A single flower as we sat here waiting, but now a seven-sided flower, many-petalled, red, puce, purple-shaded, stiff with silver-tinted leaves—a whole flower to which every eye brings its own contribution. (4b.39)
Like the characters themselves, this multi-faceted flower's appearance depends on the eye of the beholder.
The same image appears toward the end of the novel, when Bernard sums up the events and relationships that the book has presented:
Marriage, death, travel, friendship… town and country; children and all that; a many-sided substance cut out of this dark; a many-faceted flower. Let us stop for a moment; let us behold what we have made. Let it blaze against the yew trees. One life. There. It is over. Gone out. (8b.44)
In this moment, Bernard once again uses the flower to represent the unity and dissonance that coexist within the narrators' lives, symbolizing the wealth of experiences that can be wrapped up into one life.
Of course, there are numerous other instances of flower imagery throughout the book—what are some other big ones? Is it always a symbol of life?