The extract is taken from the first chapter of Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway. In it the character of Mrs Dalloway is introduced through her actions, her thoughts, her memories about her past in Burton, her feelings in that particular morning, the opinion of a neighbour, her look and her approce to life.
The setting of the extract is a morning of June in London. Mrs Dalloway lives in Westminster, but some of her reflections about her past go back to Burton, where she stayer when she was eighteen.
Mrs Dalloway is a over fifty woman of the middle class, who decides to buy the flowers for her party. The squek of the hinges in her house (in the present) brings her mind to the mornings during her stay in Burton (in the past), and the thought of her old friend Peter Walsh reminds her he is coming in London (the future) and, when she goes out her home, she is hit by the sounds and by the people she sees in the street, which create in her mind other reflections.
The language the writer uses is quite simple. All the extract is a stream of consciousness in Mrs Dalloway's mind and, in a brief part, in Scrope Purvis' mind, Mrs Dalloway's neighbour. So the language that is used is mind language, simple and immediate, because this is also the way humans' mind works, connecting experiences, events from past, present and future.
The narrator is a third person and he is omniscient, but not intrusive.
The reader knows all the thoughts that emerge from Mrs Dalloway's interior monologue. The reader understands Mrs Dalloway's view of the world and life, which probably was the view of every middle class woman in that period. The character records everything around it and then it revises everything in its own mind through its experiences and its opinions. So, in the extract character's way to conceive the world is presented.