In this extra, taken from Mrs. Dalloway’s last part, a novel written by Virginia Woolf, there’s a third person omniscient narrator who adopts Clarissa’s point of view explaining all her feelings and thoughts for Smith’s suicide. After this piece of news, she retires herself in a little room.

Already at the beginning the reader understands she’s rather annoyed because Bradshaw has told her Smith’s suicide and was dealing with death’s topic during her party. The one she had paid a lot of attention on, it should have been something extraordinary and extremely funny, but someone was ruining it. According to her, apparently it’s Bradshaw’s fault but the reader understands that in truth it’s Smith’s one. Indeed this paragraph starts and ends with the same question, regarding Bradshaw’s behavior, and in the middle there’s Smith’s suicide description and Clarissa’s feelings about it, that is she’s angry with Smith’s choice but she’s unable to admit herself it, therefore she shifts her inner sensation’s causes to someone else.

In addition, another Clarissa’s quality is her sensitivity: the narrator tells her body’s always able to go throw someone else’s disgrace. And in particular, Smith’s death details are poetical described, although the single episode is communicated objectively and directly. This underlines again narrator’s aim: to deal with the inner’s field rather than the external’s one (showed in plot’s minimal reduction too).

The second paragraph moves the attention to life and death binomial: from this point Clarissa and Smith’s action are just a pretext to deal with this topic and Clarissa, in particular, is the instrument to do it. The situation is excellent because she’s just known about a suicide during a party so during something enjoyable and thoughtless: she’s facing the death in her mind when her body is in a room full of life. She realizes the death is hidden, secret and omitted during the life. But this is just a lie: everyday we’re carrying the death with us simply living. And it’s a way to escape, a consolation after realizing the inability to reach your quest’s destination.

Moving to the third paragraph she reminds her human exceptions: suicide. Automatically comes on her mind a Shakespeare’s quotation about dying in a moment of being, using Virginia Woolf’s name. This passage gives a lot of truth to Clarissa’s inner monologue because the narrator communicates her thoughts unlinked, as they come in her mind.

Fourth paragraph is focused on psychiatrist’s figure, like Bradshaw: he’s described not only as something evil but reinforced with the adjective “obscurely” too. Someone able to pass over your body and to reach your soul, forcing it. Therefore he doesn’t even seem a human, but rather a monster. Mostly because he starts his therapy directly reaching your problem: according to you, life is intolerable; but it will become the after meeting him.

And then, in the fifth paragraph there’s a balance and a comparison between her and Smith, that is between who choose life and who death. When we are born we receive life as a serene walk, so something lovely. But going on it doesn’t reflects this point: life will be full of sorrow and the more you survive, the more you will suffer from. And so, what are you able to do? Waiting for the death, or reach it by killing yourself.  You’re always facing this crossroads and in each moment you can take your decision. Clarissa feels like being condemned because of her decision to live and for her impure temper.

But in the next paragraph there’s her prize: she had never felt happier than now, when she had already lived her life so she could enjoy it and appreciate every little thing. In particular, looking the sky. The world part symbol of safety for many centuries (a value given by Christian religion). And she is able to find safety in this world choosing life: after her everyday fighting with sorrows, finally she has found peace.

Finally in the last paragraph there’s the point of her reflection. Only after living a life we will be able to make a balance and understand what really matters. She looks the sky and it appears ashen and pale, differently from her dark idea. A sky carrying a part of her. She has no pity of Smith: it has been his own choice knowing the consequences too. But he is dead, not her and her guests: for them life is going on. She’s chosen life and she must face hours and the other hours again. This life: to carry on. And then she feels similar to him precisely because he is her antithesis.

As regards the language, it comes out the poetical one. In particular the reader feels life continuity very well in his mind thanks to the clock’s image: hours’ count gives dynamic repetition and succession. The same movement of the extra’s structure too. Indeed it reminds a poem structure because of its circular typology: Clarissa moves to the little room from the party firstly thinking “A young man had killed himself” and, passing through her inners ideas, she moves again from the little room returning to the party but thinking “The young man had killed himself”. Therefore the beginning is as the same as the end: Clarissa is having her party.

Furthermore, another important point is the free indirect speech’s choice which confers truth and makes the reader closely to the character and her feelings. For example the first sentence “What business had the Bradshaws to talk of death at her party!” lets the reader understands Clarissa’s annoyed; or the expression “What an extraordinary night!” stressed by the emphasis of the “!” makes the reader conscious she’s happy and satisfied.  

Then, in my opinion this extra includes the most important novel’s function: it’s a genre able to include all the other ones. The reader is able to find it out her for the poetical language (poetry), the rhetorical questions (theatre’s monologues and rhetoric) and its novel’s main characteristic that is the mixture between narrative’s techniques (for example feelings expressed during narration with free indirect speech or narrator’s voice together character’s one).

After this reflection she comes out from the little room and starts enjoying herself.