The first extract, that is the beginning of the novel Mrs. Dalloway is in medias res. V. Woolf focus on Mrs. Daloway's social status: she is a married woman. So the reader understands that all life of Mrs. Dalloway is linked to her social status of married woman.
Moreover the narrator decides Mrs Dalloway has a proper name, Clarissa, but she prefers calling her MRS Dalloway, because it is most important.
The narrator is omniscient, so she seems to know everything about the character. Moreover she sounds eclipsed but she is there. All the same the reader feels in the character's mind. Woolf wrote much of Mrs. Dalloway in free indirect discourse. We are generally immersed in the subjective mental world of various characters, although the book is written in the third person. Woolf seldom uses quotation marks to indicate dialogue to ensure that the divide between characters' interior and exterior selves remains fluid. In this way, Woolf allows us to evaluate characters from both external and internal perspectives.
The narrator presents Clarissa when she would buy the flowers herself. She is full of happy thoughts as she sets off to buy flowers that beautiful June morning, but her rapture reminds her of a similar June morning thirty years earlier, when she stood at the window at Bourton and felt something awful might happen. Tragedy is never far from her thoughts: one of the central dilemmas Clarissa will face is her own mortality.
Woolf reveals mood and character through unusual and complex syntax. The movement of London are reflected in sentences that go on for line after line. These sentences also reflect Clarissa's character, particularly her ability to enjoy life. As Clarissa sees the summer air moving the leaves like waves, sentences become rhythmic, full of dashes and semicolons that imitate the movement of water.

 

In the second extract from the novel The Hours written by M. Cunningham, instead, the situation is always the same of the first extract. The reader perceives Clarissa organizes what she is still to do (she is still to buy the flowers). In fact, Clarissa's chapter recreates the first chapter of Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. The beginning of Mrs. Dalloway has the Clarissa going out to buy flowers for a party that she will be throwing that night. It also describes in minute detail the shopping trip that Clarissa takes, and Cunningham's Clarissa and Woolf's Clarissa both find beauty in small pieces of the world.
As in the first extract, the narrator knows everything about her, so he is omniscient. Moreover, the narrator is apparently hidden, but he reveals himself when he comments what Clarissa pretends. In fact, his comments that should remain hidden are placed in brackets.
Unlike the first extract, the reader feels nearer the narrator, because he uses simple present, which expresses immediacy. Cunningham presents Clarissa Vaughn, while she remembers that she must buy flowers. She leaves her lover, Sally, cleaning the bathroom and dashes out of the house. As she steps outside, she admires the June morning and feels lucky to be alive. Clarissa has a sensitive perception of the world, and the small moments that constitute the first extract reveal her love for life, her insecurities, and her conflicted relationships with the people she loves. Cunningham introduces details and themes of Clarissa's life slowly, through her thought process and her contact with the objects and people she sees.