What an Extraordinary Night is an extract taken from Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. Mrs Dalloway is a Postmodernist novel published in 1925.

The extract belongs to the last part of the novel and is about the communication of Septimus's suicide news at Clarissa's party.

Sir Bradshaw, Septimus psychiatrist, arrives with his wife at the party and tells the guests that Septimus Warren has committed suicide. Clarissa and Septimus don't ever met in the novel but they live a paralel life.

In the novel there are two temporal dimensions: the inner dimension which is Clarissa's consciousness dimension, and the external dimension, the dimension of life.

Clarissa's reaction in front of the news is to take distance from death but she thinks about the way Septimus committed suicide.

The extract is arranged into five sequences.

The fist sequence's funcion is to introduce the readers to the news.

The second sequence's function is to present Clarissa's reaction to the news.

The third sequence is a way to express Clarissa's view of the psychiatrist. She considers Sir W. Bradshaw evil because he was capable of some indescribable outrage, psychiatrists make people angry.

The function of the fourth sequence is to convey Clarissa's terror. The reader undestand the way Clarissa reacts to life and death.

The fifth sequence is a way to present Clarissa's idea about the passage of time and the inevitability of death. While people is still laughing and shouting in the drowing room, an old woman is going to bed in the opposite room. Clarissa also thinks that Semptimus's suicide has been in some way helpful because now "Fear no more the heat of the sun".

The difference between Clarissa and Septimus is expressed in the different view of life: they're both afraid of living but they take different decisions: Septimus decides to put an end to his life, clarissa don't.

In this extract there are two quotations that express both Clarissa's attitudes to life. The first quotation taken from Othello by Shakespeare underlines that the idea of death came to Clarissa's mind in a moment of intence happiness, a moment of being. The second quotation taken from Shakespeare's Cymbeline expresses Clarissa's decision to go on living.