The Waves

The Waves is both a shared literary reference for Theodore Finch and Violet Markey and the source material Finch reshapes into a message that Violet reads as a possible clue to his whereabouts. Its importance lies not only in what the book says, but in how Finch selects and reorders its words, turning their private practice of quotation into an urgent, uncertain form of communication.

Discovery and Shared Use

Finch and Violet discover The Waves together, a book by Virginia Woolf, and quote lines from it to one another from time to time. The references become part of their shared language: when Violet shows Finch’s message to Kate Finch, she explains that the book is one they had found and that they had been exchanging its lines. Kate’s first response is bewilderment; she does not know what the people in the book are doing or how the passage could connect to Finch’s location. The book’s significance therefore depends on the history Violet and Finch have made with it, not on an obvious clue that any reader could decode unaided.

Finch’s Reassembly of the Text

The message draws on lines across several pages rather than quoting one continuous passage. Violet finds the relevant words in her copy, where she has marked them, and recognizes that Finch has taken them out of sequence, choosing particular lines and joining them in his own arrangement. She compares this method to his Post-it songs: in both, fragments are selected and assembled into a new expression. The passage’s images of enduring blue and a hole, shining in darkness, being prepared, and flowing while rooted preserve the book’s language while making the selection itself feel personal and deliberate.

The Message as a Clue

Finch sends the passage through Facebook after emailing his family; Violet sees the new message at 9:47 a.m., four minutes after that email. She answers with an appeal for him to stay, but he does not reply, and his voicemail remains full. When she later considers the book alongside the timing of the message, she connects it to the Jovian-Plutonian hoax, also associated with 9:47, and interprets the water imagery as evidence that Finch may have returned to one of the places they wandered. The reference does not name a destination: Violet considers several possibilities, including the Bloomington Empire Quarry, Seven Pillars, and the river by the high school. The Waves thus gives her a pattern to follow without removing the uncertainty that makes the search urgent.