I'm going to analyse an extract taken from the start of the novel Mrs Dalloway, written in 1925 by Virginia Woolf.

We know that the novel has no story - line because the concept of time during modernism has changed, evolving in a simultaneous concept of time instead of a linear one.

In this specific novel the time is the time of Mrs Dalloway's stream consciousness.

The extract starts with free direct style, "Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers", which introduces the situation: Mrs Dalloway is organizing a party she is going to give in the evening.

The reader can immediately see there is a third persona narrator who adopts Mrs Dalloway's point of view.

Going on reading the reader finds the name of an other character, Lucy, who seems to be a secondary character; probably she is a servant in the house  who helped Mrs Dalloway in the organization of the party.

Afetr that we have access again to Clarissa's thoughts, reported by the narrator using free direct style. She is aware of the surrounded world because she speaks of the weather, which is as if "issued to children on a beach".

The narrator continues with free direct style, showing the reader the most inner thoughts of the character.

"What a lark!What a plunge!" is a clear example of free direct speech and the effect on the reader of this adoption, in addition with the use of exclamation marks, is that the reader has the impression of hearing the exact words, it is as if the reader were there, on the scene, with Mrs Dalloway.

When the reader comes across a passage where there is a frequent use of free indirect thoughts he feels as if he were inside the character's mind.

The effect of free direct thoughts is that the reader comes to know the message exactly without any narrator's filter and so he is free to make up his mind about the situation. 

The narrator varies the intensity of the character's feelings switching from indirect to direct speech.

An other aspect the intelligent reader should observe is that there are very short conjunctions in the narration, so that it sounds as if the narrator were eclipsed.

The eclipse of the narrator, together with the use shift of the point of view, are technical devices typical of modernist narration.

Then, the reader follows Mrs Dalloway's thoughts that go back to the past, to her youth in Bourton.

One of the most distinctive feature of this novel is that Virginia Woolf seems to cut the distances between prose and poetry; she adopts language in prose which is very similar to poetic language because of the high density of language devices such as anaphoric constructions ("What a lark! What a plunge!", " How fresh, how calm"), alliterations ( alliteration of the letter r, s, l, w, winding, rising, feeling, falling, standing, looking ), similes ("like the flap of a wave"), repetitions (wave - wave, looking - looking) and the use of language of sense impression (she could hear, feeling, looking, ).

As a matter of fact in modernism there was more interest in how to say thing instead in what to say because the movement wanted to express reality in the better way possible to give the reader the idea of reality how really is.

The use of the simile "like a wave" recalls the idea of something fluid and flimsy, moreover the rytm of the wave is given by the repetition of verbs in progressive aspect.

The use of anaphoric constructions and alliterations have the function of sticking into the reader's mind what the writer wants to underline and emphasize.

An intervention of the narrator provides the reader the additional piece of information that  Mrs Dalloway, when in Bourton, was 18.      

It is a rare case of intrusion of the narrator.

The intelligent reader, with this intrusion, can also understand that the narrator seems to know everything about the characters, so he is a third person omniscient narrator who adopts the interior monologue and the shift of the point of view.

While reminding her youth, Clarissa reminds also the feeling that something awful was happening. It anticipates the reader that something sad will happen in the story.

As a matter of fact, the start of the novel is a sort of ouverture (a term which belongs to the field of music but that can be used also in the novel) and generally in the ouverture is contained all the opera.

She reminds a particular episode of her youth which make her remind also Peter Walsh, a new character.

What we now about him is filtered by Clarissa's monologue; the adoption of direct speech is functional to provide the reader a more detailed mental image of the episode, irt is as if the reader were there with the characters.