MRS DALLOWAY - PAG. 216,217

EXERCISE 1

a) All the verbs that introduce Mrs Dalloway's actions and thoughts:
HAD REACHED, STOOD, LOOKING, FELT, SLICED, WATCHED, THOUGHT, KNEW, READ, WALKING, REMEMBERED (3 times), LOVED, ASKED, RESENT, SURVIVED (2 times), LOOKED.

b) You can see the presence of a third person narrator in the first line ("She had reached...Piccadilly").
Interior monologue is used in the other lines.

EXERCISE 2

a) Aspects of personality that Clarissa considers negative: inner contrast, she does not consider herself intelligent ("not that she thought herself clever", "she knew nothing").

Aspects of personality that Clarissa considers positive: she does not give judgements ("she would not say of anyone in the world"),"her only gift was knowing people almost by instincts", "she was positive".

b) Clarissa remembered the past through situations, places, friends and actions and it seems she is happy.
She says to love her present although she had contradictory feelings.

c) Contradictory aspects in her personality: she feels young, but at the same time aged; she slices like a knife through everything, but at the same time she is outside; she feels to belong to this world, but at the same time she feels out of it.

d) Clarissa has got a positive feeling towards death. The quotation from Shakespeare is connected to her feelings because it underlines that you must not have fear.

EXERCISE 3

a) Techniques:
1. FREE INDIRECT THOUGHT = "She would not say...that"
2. THIRD PERSON NARRATION FROM INSIDE THE CHARACTER'S POINT OF VIEW = "She felt very young..aged"
3. FREE DIRECT THOUGHT = "What was she trying to recover?"
4. DIRECT QUESTIONS WITH VERB TENSE IN INDIRECT FORM = "Did it matter then she asked herself...did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely"

b) Simile: "She sliced LIKE a knife trough everything" ; "If you put her in a room with someone, up went her back LIKE a cat's"; "being laid out LIKE a mist between the people she knew best".

Repetition: "out, out, far out", "very, very", "no language, no history", "she would not say of Peter, she would not say of herself, I am this, I am that".

The function is to create a close relationship between the reader and the character. The reader can better understand character's feelings, thoughts and emotions through technical devices like similes (to compare something to something else to provide a mental image) and repetitions (to stick something into the reader's mind).