Abstract:

model. The essential character Percival holds the coherence of the whole novel. He is an abstract model, because the reader can only perceive Percival via other characters’ eyes. The image of this essential character has been shaped by multi-layered vision among other characters. In other words, Percival reveals the inter-subjectivity, which constructs the inner form of the novel. As the representation of the multi-layered vision, this character also reinforces the inter-subjectivity. Tamar Katz claims that the reader is able to find two kinds of concept, in order to define subjectivity in The Waves – one is the philosophical self – which is abstract and essential, and is detached from social, economical and cultural surroundings. The other self is defined by social codes, such as gender and class (1995: 234). Woolf’s “I” in this novelis a metaphor of “multiple subject positions” (Greene, 1999: 217).Here, I would argue, the “I” in The Waves indicates the “eye”. The narrator “I” can be seen as a way to perceive the external world. Barthes’s and Lacan’s theories of the Gaze also help to contribute to the theoretical development of the discourse of the Gaze, which is quite useful to observe the textual form of The Waves, in terms of vision and representation. In “Right in the Eyes”, Roland Barthes defined the formation of “the Gaze” (1991: 237). First of all, Barthes claimed that the Gaze is not a sign – because the sign repeats itself, so that the viewer is able to recognize it, while the sign

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