MRS. DALLOWAY- What an extraordinary night!
Virginia Woolf

This text written by Virginia Woolf is set at the end of her novel “Mrs Dalloway”. The story of this novel is confined to a day and so the setting of the text that I am going to analyze is the night.
The extract is organized into seven sequences.

      In the first one the third person narrator wants to render Clarissa’s reaction in front of the news of Septimus’s death. She is clearly annoyed by the Bradshaws because they are continuously talking about the suicide and, in this way, they break the atmosphere of the party. The narrator focuses the attention not only on Clarissa’s thought but also on the way her body reacts to the news “her dress flamed, her body burnt.”
The narrator uses a typical Modernist  technique and  so we can say that Woolf’s novel is a Modernist one: she combines some words in order to make the reader see what the character is doing. “Through him, blundering, bruising, went the rusty spikes”.
Virginia Woolf’s novels not only belong to the movement of Modernism but  are also considered a sort of poetical texts because of the frequent use of metaphor, simile and onomatopoeic words.
In order to make the reader also hear the man who falls, the novelist uses some words like “thud” to describe the falling.

        In sequence two Clarissa remembers. The novelist uses the interior monologue to render Miss Dalloway's  stream of consciousness so that the reader can understand the thoughts and emotions that cross Clarissa’s mind and, at the same time see what happens around her, at the party. Connection between the inner world and the outsider world is typical of Woolf's fiction.
In this sequences Clarissa thinks about the people of her adolescence and the idea of Septimus’s death stirs a reflection about death: she believes death is defiance, an attempt to communicate what people in life were not able to communicate.

        In the third sequence Clarissa explains her point of view on Sir Bradshaw Septimus's  psychiatrist ; she cannot stand him, he is capable of atrocities. Mrs. dalloway believes.  She thinks that psychiatrists like him are useless: in their treatment they only force the soul of patients and they make violence on their consciousness.
There is a quotation from Shakespeare’s Othello here: “If it were now to die, ‘twere now to be most happy”. This means that  the idea of Septimus’s death comes in an intense and profound moment of happiness.

        In the fourth sequence Clarissa understands that even if she finds life difficult, thinking about beautiful moments and people she likes,  she will  be able to face life. On the other hand, Septimus was not able to do this: he was unable to reach balance, he could not bear life, he became insane and so he committed suicide because of his inability to compromise.

         In the sixth sequence Clarissa is watching out of the window (outsider world) and she sees a woman in the house in front of her, the old lady stares her and she goes to bed. This figure is significant because the woman is old and so she riminds old age  and she is going to sleep, so recalling death.
In this sequence the outside world and the inner world come together again.

        In the  last sequence Clarissa definitely understands that life goes on, even if Septimus is dead. The clock strikes, people go on living and she does not pity Septimus.
There is another quotation from Shakespeare’s Cymbeline: “Fear no more the heat of the sun”. This quotation could suggest that Clarissa  will not  be afraid and will accept the inevitability of life.