MRS DALLOWAY by Virginia Woolf

-What an Extraordinary Night!-

Analysis

The extract comes from the last pages of Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway. The text deals with Clarissa's reaction to the suicide of Septimus Warren Smith, one of Sir Bradshaw's patients.

When the woman is informed of the man's death, she feels the need of escaping from her party and she walks away into a side room to stay on her own for a while.

She feels immediately involved in the accident and such feeling leads her to a thorough reflection about life, its meaning and value.

Imagining Septimus throwing himself from a window, she figures out her idea of death: death is defiance; an embrace capable of communicating people's impossibility of reaching their centre.

And life, what is life? Clarissa fears it, she can't help sensing a certain terror when she considers that such life, the life her parents gave her, should be "walked with serenity", and she is not sure she could do that, without Richard to delight and revive her every time she needs him.

She puts into contrast her easy and successful life with the one of many suffering people which, every day, decide to commit suicide. She can't stand pretending she doesn't care at all about that, when, actually, she feels involved and sympathetic.

She suddenly remembers her youth and the days she was happy in Bourton. She starts thinking about the sky, and the positive emotions it was able to awaken in her mind when she was there.

She decides to look at it, and so she parts the curtain and sees an old woman going to bed.

Such vision makes her experience a moment of true living, and, unexpectedly, she realize that, although Septimus has died, life keeps going on and there is no need to fear that.

Clarissa's thoughts are expressed by Virginia Woolf making use of a very fragmented syntax, full of repetitions and conjunctions. Such structure is a vehicle to convey the idea of an interrupted stream of thoughts that flows through the woman's mind. The reader can't avoid following it and coming to the same conclusions Mrs Dalloway figures out.