Six characters speak in alternating soliloquies from childhood to old age, and Woolf's prose reaches its furthest extreme of lyrical abstraction. The waves rise and fall; the sun moves across the sky; Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny, and Louis live their separate lives and meet at intervals to mark time passing. There is almost no plot. What there is instead is the texture of consciousness itself, rendered with a precision that no novel had achieved before or has achieved since. It is Woolf's most experimental work, and her most demanding.