"What an extraordinary night !" is an extract from Mrs. Dalloway written by Virginia Woolf. The extract is the final scene of the novel when Sir William Bradshaw and his wife Lady Bradshaw arrive at Clarissa's party and mention the suicide of Septimus Warren Smith, Sir Bradshaw's patient. Clarissa's reaction is to walk away from her guest into a side room.
The extract is Clarissa's interior monolog and the narrator adopted her point of view.
The first sequence has the function to convey the reader to Clarissa's reaction and it underlines the poetic use of language, characterized by the presence of onomatopoeia and repetitions. Clarissa feels angry that the Bradshaws brought death to her party and it is shown by the exclamation mark. Then, she images that Septimus commits suicide and she images how her body flashed on the ground.
The second sequence has the function to show the relation between life and death. So, the reader understands what Clarissa feels and both inner feelings and he understands what is happening in the external world. Clarissa feels that Septimus's death is her own disgrace, and she is ashamed that she is an upper-class society wife who has schemed and desired social success. His death is also her disgrace because she compromised her passion and her soul when she married Richard, while Septimus preserved his soul by choosing death. The narrator uses brackets to comment.
In the third sequence V. Woolf uses a quotation from Shakespeare's Othello . She has lived to regret her decisions, just as Othello did. Clarissa sees her life clearly and comes to terms with her own aging and death, which ultimately enables her to endure. So, her mind is crossed by a memory of a quotation that means the death is coming in a moment of happiness.
In the fourth sequence Clarissa describe Sir William Bradshaw. He was Septimus's doctor and she describes him as an evil who had pushed him to commit suicide. The narrator uses brackets to comment what Clarissa feels.
In the fifth sixth and seventh sequences Clarissa feels an awful fear in her hear because she remembers the moment she felt she could die at Bourton in total happiness and she considers the young man's death her own disgrace.
In the last sequence Clarissa is at the centre of the contrast between her social life and the world outside. A new thought come to her and she experiences a "moment of being". The narrator uses a quotation from Shakespeare's Cymbeline from a funeral song that celebrates death as a relief and stresses death's inevitability. The quotation expresses Clarissa's decision bot be afraid about life but to accept the inevitability of life.