Learning Path » 5A Interacting
Read up to line 3 and say who the narrator is.
There is a third person omniscient narrator, because he comes into the mind of the character adopting the interior monologue though the free indirect style or the direct style.
You will have realized that the narrator is talking about Mrs Dalloway. Go on reading and while reading answer the questions below. At the end you will have a summery of Mrs Dalloway’s actions and movements.
Where is Mrs Dalloway?
Mrs Dalloway is along Bond Street
What is she doing?
She watches around her and she reminds herself of her youth: shops, her father, her uncle…her life.
What does she do then?
She thinks about her life and in particular about her unhappiness caused by her wrong choices.
Where is she going?
She goes to Mulberry the florists.
Read the passage again carefully un underline, whenever possible, the places where the train of thought jumps abruptly from one point to another.
And her old Uncle William used to say a lady is known by her shoes and her gloves. He had turned on his bed one morning in the middle of the War. He had said, “I have had enough.”
Elizabeth really cared for Elizabeth really cared for her dog most of all.
The whole house this morning smelt of tar.
Still, better poor Grizzle than Miss Kilman; better distemper and tar and all the rest of it than sitting mewed in a stuffy bedroom with a prayer book! Better anything, she was inclined to say
But it might be only a phase, as Richard said, such as all girls go through. It might be falling in love. But why with Miss Kilman?
Year in year out she wore that coat; she perspired; she was never in the room five minutes without making you feel her superiority, your inferiority; how poor she was; how rich you were; how she lived in a slum without a cushion or a bed or a rug or whatever it might be, all her soul rusted with that grievance sticking in it, her dismissal from school during the War—poor embittered unfortunate creature! For it was not her one hated but the idea of her, which undoubtedly had gathered in to itself a great deal that was not Miss Kilman;
had become one of those spectres with which one battles in the night; one of those spectres who stand astride us and suck up half our life-blood, dominators and tyrants; for no doubt with another throw of the dice, had the black been uppermost and not the white
she would have loved Miss Kilman! But not in this world. No.
Now consider the diagram below and answer the following questions.
Is the point of view the same for the two narratives?
The point of view is not the same, because there is a third person omniscient narrator who tells the story. But there is also the third person omniscient narrator who enters into the mind of Mrs Dalloway, the process is called eclipse of the narrator, adopting the technique of the interior monologue.
Has the time of narrator any relation with chronological time? Remember that most of what is told takes place in Mrs Dalloway’s mind.
No, it hasn’t, because the time of the text is the time of consciousness.