Analysis of the extract taken from V. Woolf's “Mrs. Dalloway”.

The extract describes Mrs Dalloway walking through Hyde Park when she is coming back her house: the speaking voice tells everything about her thoughts, her feelings, her personality, her memories and her considerations.

The main topic of the extract is memory. As a matter of fact starting from her particular feeling, Mrs Dalloway makes some considerations about herself. She analysis positive and negative aspects of her personality (she considers herself no more intelligent or cultured and she is not able to give rationally judgements to people or to herself. The only one quality she notices in her is the acute instinct.

After that, there is a reflection on the passing of time, it starts looking things around her: the taxi cabs, people walking, the street she’s walking on. She thinks about death. Her feelings towards death are not a negative , she is not afraid from death: she thinks memory has the power to keep people alive. The consideration is extended to her and to people important for her, as Peter Walsh (her first true love).

At the end of the extract a quotation is given the reader: it is taken from Shakespeare “Cymbeline” and refers to the fears of the human being and to appearance. Mrs. Dalloway links it to her reflection on death and to her fears about the passing of time.

The narrative technique used in the extract is the interior monologue. The third person narrator expresses through the shift of the point of view Mrs Dalloway’s interiority, using free indirect style. The opposition between interiority and exteriority is highlighted by the matching of brief sentences which remind to verse.