I'm going to analize the last part of Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, an extract taken from Mrs Dalloway, 1925 - "what business had the Bradshaws...". In this extract the narrator describes to reader the current Clarissa's party. Narrator writes about guests that appear during the party suc as William Bradshaw. Unfortunately, between party people a horrible whisper rise from the depth of unknown: people became to know of Septimus' suicide. The event creates a parallelism between two characters: Clarissa and Septimus. Clarissa accepts her life condition and she enjoys small moments of happines, instead Septimus can't tolerate to go on living, attempting to suicide. The narrator is a third person narrator who adopts Clarissa’s point of view to describe every detail of Clarissa's reaction for Septimus' death. The aggressive use of words reveals Clarissa's feelings: her body burnt, her dress flamed. She has got a strong reaction because she never thought that Septimus could suicide. She imagine the scene and she's scared of it.  The repetition of the sound "th" creates an athmosphere of mistery and it is spy of Clarissa's interior confusion. We can lock Clarissa's interior monologue, even if we can't find it through narrative technique. Otherwise, Clarissa's feels scared also for an other reason: the news could spoil her party. The exclamation mark "And Bradshaws talked of it at her party!" underlines Mrs. Dalloway's fear.
The second sequence deals with the relationship life and death in human being. Clarissa goes back with the memory at her adolescence, realizing that death is a concept that comes in human minds everytime, also at her party. And the whisper is the explanation. The main part of the sequence deals with "defiance", the thought and feeling about death, which is refuse and challange at the same time. Death is an attempt, suicide is an attempt to end a suffered life. The focus of Clarissa's reflection is the sense of life. Septimus has commited suicide because he understood what life means, so he suicide himself. In this case the Modern movement rises from the contenents: death becomes a sign more than a signify or signifier. From the sign you can go back to its causes (such as doctors when they visit a patient). Clarissa's follows this way: she tries to find causes of Septimus' suicide: he can’t stand the life any longer, he can't have moments of being any more.
From this text we understand how Modernism is the period when people try to express something about their inner side. So, problems about how to live are at the first place. Clarissa’s decision is not to be afraid of life, but to accept its inevitability.