Narrative (In)completion in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales and Woolf’s The Waves

I examine how narrative and personal completion manifest—and are continually unsettled—in The Canterbury Tales and The Waves. Though separated by centuries and written within vastly different literary traditions, both texts explore the tension between fragmentation and wholeness: the ways in which stories and characters can be constructed from partial, shifting materials, and the ways in which the illusion of completeness can mask deeper absences (holes). Drawing on Woolf’s own theories of reading and character—and her sense that readers instinctively create “rickety and ramshackle” wholes from scattered impressions—I will consider how each text engages with the paradox of narrative closure. In Chaucer, these ideas emerge through the many dimensions and meanings of “hools” (“wholes”)—as they apply to the open structure of the pilgrimage and the polyvocal instability of his characters. Comparably, in Woolf, I explore a parallel between linguistic construction and subject formation as they relate to fragmentation and completion. Ultimately, this project explores how these two authors—one anticipating the novel and the other deconstructing it—confront the limitations of literary form and embrace the fragment as a site of imaginative and existential meaning-making.