The extra is taken from Mrs.Dalloway, a novel written by Virginia Woolf.

Being a modernist novel, the plot is reduced to the minimal: even in this part the reader knows just that a women is having a party when someone tells her about a death and she retiresto reflect in a little room.

The narrator  is a third person one who adopts Clarissa Dalloway’s point of view, letting the reader  know her feelings and thoughts.

At the beginning the reader understands Clarrisa’s annoyance for Bradshaw’s piece of news (Smith’s suicide), the one which ruins her extraordinary and funny party. Not only for the topic, but even for Clarissa’s sensitivity power to let her body able to go throw someone else’s disgrace.  Because of the poetical language use (during a narration) and the topics of life and death, it comes out that the narrator wants to deal with the inner’s field and the two characters, Clarissa and Smith, are just the instruments to do it.  

According to Clarissa (so to the narrator), we’re facing death everyday just living: every past moment is just a step to death’s direction. And it’s a way to escape, a consolation after realizing our inability to reach our quest, our life’s sense. But, we don’t consider this point, we just omit and hide it, there is a human exception: suicide. This thought 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.

In addition, the kind of reasoning made by Clarissa, is the typical psychiatrist’s one, that is explaining your thoughts and reaching your conclusions by your own. And so, there’s a little sequence 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.

Moreover, there’s a comparison and a balance between Clarissa, the life’s symbol, and Smith, the death’s one. 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? You have a dual alternative: 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. However, there’s a prize too: the happiness of appreciate your life and every little thing. Clarissa is now able to do it because she’s chosen life. In particular, the narrator uses the sky metaphor, the world part symbol of safety for many centuries (a value given by Christian religion): Clarissa’s most enjoyable activity is looking the sky, so hoping for the best and safety from the sorrows.

Now, the reader finds her reflection’s point: we will be able to appreciate life and to understand what really matters only after living a life and resisting. 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.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.

For this last comment, the reader understands that at the beginning she felt annoyed to Smith rather than to Bradshow. Indeed that 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. So, even the language used is a textual spy of this sensation. And after that the reader is able to sustain the structure’s strength: it gives continuity and makes him/her think to the hours. In particular 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.

Last but not least, 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. 

Personal comment: 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).