This is an extract taken from the novel “Mrs Dalloway”. The novel was written by Virginia Woolf in 1925, and details a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, a fictional high-society woman in post- First World War England.

Mrs Dalloway take place on a Wednesday in June of 1923 and begins with the protagonist of the novel, Clarissa Dalloway, who goes to Bond Street to by some flowers for a party she is giving that night at her house. London is bustling and full of noise and it is a fresh mid-June morning,. This air recalls her when she was eighteen on her father’s estate, Bourton. She sees herself at eighteen, standing at the window, feeling as if something awful might happen. Past and present continue to intermingle as she walks to the flower shop. She imagined Peter Walsh stood within and commented on vegetables and remembered how he was strange.

The narrator in Mrs Dalloway uses the free indirect dialogue using the third person narrator. In the extract there is the narrative technique of the interior monologue, which exhibits the thoughts passing through the minds of the protagonists. This technique gives the impression of simultaneous connections between the inner and the outer world, past and present. In this way, Woolf allows us to know the protagonist from both external and internal perspectives: we follow Clarissa as she moves physically through the world, all the while listening to their most private thoughts. The subjective nature of the narrative demonstrates the unreliability of memory. Moments of time and life are highlighted and intensely analysed. Clarissa is full of happy thoughts as she sets off to buy flowers that beautiful June morning, but her rapture reminds her of a similar June morning thirty years earlier, when she stood at the window at Bourton and felt something awful might happen. Tragedy is never far from her thoughts. The narrator uses an unusual syntax, different from the traditional, because with it he couldn’t convey what she wanted. The strict grammar rules would stop the fluidity, musicality of the text. The busy London is conveyed though uncontrolled and fast sentences. These sentences also reflect Clarissa’s character. The words are almost poetic, allusive and emotional and convey a sense of fluidity; the language flows following the intimate feelings. In the extract the writing reflects the sea, the waves as the protagonist refers to the air as it “flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave”. Sentences become rhythmic, the scene moves from a scene of speech to a scene of silence.As Clarissa sees the summer air moving the leaves like waves, sentences become rhythmic, full of dashes and semicolons that imitate the choppy movement of water. Parentheses abound, indicating thoughts within thoughts, sometimes related to the topic at hand and sometimes not. Simple phrases often appear in the flow of poetic language like exclamations

The effect of this extract is to abolish the distinction between past and present by mixing sensation from the mind of the character with other images of the reality.