Whatever J. W. Graham says about The Waves Woolf scholars take seriously because he is, deservedly, foremost authority on text of Woolf's masterpiece (see WHD).' As to a 1983 article, Graham quotes Woolf's December 1930 diary (she referring to The Waves): the theme of effort, effort, dominates; not waves; & personality; & defiance (VWD, 3:339).2 This theme Graham rechristens the heroic theme, expressing surprise that he can find no explicit reference to it in letters and plans written than December 1930. If heroic theme dominant (and verb form of diary-entry indicates that Woolf thought it was) then its expression should certainly have affected Woolf's artistic strategy [for novel as a whole] far earlier than date of my epigraph (TCL, p. 313). In first section of his essay, Graham outlines his understanding of heroic theme; in second, he traces through Woolf's manuscript revisions her development of theme; in third, he asks whether or not heroic theme dominates The Waves. His answer negative. Noting, quite correctly, that critical commentary rarely treats theme as central, when it treats it at all, he infers that Woolf herself must have been wrong in her assessment of theme's centrality (TCL, p. 327). The key-point in Graham's complex argument that novel's symbolic peripeteia (Bernard's appropriation of the world of interludes in his summing up) fails. Woolfs narrative is intended to achieve a flash point where its elements are fused, its tensions released, and its contradictions resolved (TCL, p. 328). She intended this by making Bernard Percival's successor [as hero], and by suggesting . .. hero's liberation from time, his entry into another realm of being,