Analysis of the very beginning of Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway

 The extract deals with the thoughts and the feelings of Clarissa Dalloway the day she went out to buy some flowers.

The passage mixes two different time dimensions : her present and her past.

Now in the present she is walking around Westminster to go into a flower's shop. She is going to buy some flowers, not Lucy the servant, even if this work is cut out for her.

The fresh morning of June remembers her when she was young and still living at Bourton. Here she had opened a French window and she had been welcomed by a fresh, calm and still air. He was 18 and she was contemplating the flowers, the threes and the rooks, when Peter Walsh interrupted her with a question about vegetables. She reminds also the opinion she gave her, that morning on the terrace: he preferred men to cauliflowers. And now June or July, peter would be back from India.

While she is waiting for a van passing, Scrope Purvis saw her and judge her as a positive and solemn woman .

 Then the Big Bang strikes. It underlines the time passing, an hour after another. And this consideration makes her thinking how fools men are and how much they love life, independently from their wealth, social condition or age.

She also love all the simple things she can see: the cars, the omnibuses, the sandwich men,the brass bands etc. She loves life, she loves London, she loves that moment of June.

The language used is not very difficult. There are not much directed speech. The third omniscient narrator focuses is attention to the character's thought and feelings.

The reader's position is a relevant one. He has free access to character's mind. It follows that he has got all the necessary tools to give his own interpretation, to make his own opinions and ides about characters and their decision and , of course he has also got the chance to make his own expectation about the end of the narration. The expectation could have been satisfied or not.