WHAT AN EXTRAORDINARY NIGHT! By Virginia Woolf

Comprehension

1) Clarissa is told of Septimus’s death and imagines him throwing himself from a window

2) She contrasts her easy and successful life with the death and suffering of other people

3) She reflects on life and death

4) She imagines the meeting between Septimus and sir Bradshaw

5) She thinks life can be difficult but she has the support of her husband

6) She thinks of her happiness at Bourton and of the pleasure of one derives from the activities of day to day life

7) She walks to the window

8) The sky is not how Clarissa had imagined it

9) She parts the curtains and sees an old lady looking at her

10) She watches the old lady going to bed

11) She thinks of Septimus again but she does not pity him

12) She decides to go back to the party

Interpretation

• The passage is about Clarissa’s reflections about death.

• First she is bothered by the Bradshaws’s talk about death at her party, but successively she thinks about the scene of the suicide.

• She considers death as an attempt of communicating: it is people’s awareness of impossibility to reach a centre.

• Clarissa thinks sir Bradshaw is a great doctor, extremely polite to women, but she has the power of forcing your soul, he looks “capable of outrage” (line 28).

• Clarissa is afraid of death for the first time.

• She realizes that death is inevitable and life is made of terrifying things, like the night she watches out of her window.

• Quotations by W. Shakespeare:

1. Death could be a way to escape reality, and she links the reason to Septimus’s suicide.

2. Clarissa feels the inevitability of death and she reflects on the idea of living every moment without fear.

• Many sentences are full of repetitions and conjunctions because the writer displays the direct thoughts of the character. In this way, the reader finds him/herself in Clarissa’s mind and feels very close to her.

• Virginia Woolf conveys life by dealing with death, therefore she does not follow the traditional novel’s conventions. The importance of life is emphasized by the idea of unknowness of death, and the thought of dying can make people to appreciate life every day.

• Quotations from the text:

1. There was an embrace in death.

2. Nothing could be slow enough; nothing last too long.

3. […] Lost herself in the process of living, to find it, with a shock of delight, as the sun rose, as the day sank.