Comprehension

Mrs. Dalloway is going to buy the flowers.

She is both joyful and terrified, and she remembers of her girlhood when she was eighteen feeling that something awful would happen.

The two different time dimensions in the passage are the past and the present.

A little squeak of the hinges evokes in Clarissa girlhood memories.

Peter Walsh was in love with her when there were young, but they did not get married. In the past she liked him, she remembers some his sayings, his smile etc, but now his letters are boring, so she does not like him as she used to.

Scrope Purvis thinks that she was charming lively woman, as a jay, though she was fifty.

While she is walking through the street she thinks that people are fool because they love the life, not only rich men but also poor people.In her opinion the life is something to create, to build up and it is for the whole people.

Interpretation

The narrator is third person omniscient narrator, reliable and not intrusive. He does not always coincides with main characters but uses shift of points of view.

Virgina Woolf's style is defined as "poetic prose", because the reader can find many poetry elements in her novels and also a rhythm in her texts. She uses onomatopoetic words ("squeak of hinges"), repetitions("What a lark! What a plunge"; "How fresh, how calm"), similies and imagery ("...fresh as if issued to..."; "like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave"; "a touch of a bird"), alliterations("had her work cut out for her";"trupm, and trudge"; "brass bands";"...what she loved; life; London;"), lists ("...rising, falling; standing and looking..."; "...making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it...").

Clarissa's characterization is made through:

-dialogue(when she remembers of dialogue with Peter)

-her thoughts and feelings(when she walk through the street)

-her behaviour(how Scorpe Purvis sees her), and also with it physical descriptions(white hair)

-her social statue, presentation with her married surname.

The squeak of hinges evokes her memories and there starts her stream of thoughts. The reader can find it also while she is walking through the street. In my opinion interior monologue is more direct because the character express his feeling and thoughts and they seem to be more organized, while in James Joyce's stream of consciousness is more complex and it is not always easy to dinstinguish thoughts and often they seem incomprehensible.

Similarities between Clarissa's characterization and painting:

-both women are presented in their everyday actions, through their social statue and description(the woman painted seems to belong to the lower-class)...