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Fiction

Notes and Septimus Warren Smith. But in the course of a single day they live their whole lives and
the reader gets to know everything about them. In this novel, the past lives of the characters
are not narrated in chronological order; rather they emerge gradually, in fragments, as memories.
At the very beginning of the book we immediately learn something about Mrs. Dalloway’s
past life. As soon as she sets off shopping she has flashes of memory of the early morning air
at Bourton when she was young and she half remembers something that Pater Walsh had said.
So in this novel, the line between past and present is blurred. The transition from present to
past and back into present requires but just a single moment. Past, present and future are
intermingled in this novel.

Inspite of subjective time scheme, clock time has also been emphasized throughout the novel.
Mental time does not progress steadily forward, like the clock time we follow. This point is
illustrated by Clarissa’s arrival at the flower shop in the morning; her senses are effortlessly
taken to evening time as she thinks and her thoughts flow easily from her seeing the flowers
in the present to being drawn back to memories and sensations from her past. At that moment
the bell of Big Ben makes her feel that she is running out of time and reminds her of her
middle age and that she has done nothing, which civilization would consider impressive.
Another major narrative technique used great deal in Mrs. Dalloway is a particular method of
representing what the characters are saying and thinking, which is called “free indirect speech”.
In this method the narrator tells us about what a character has said or thought without
necessarily reproducing the exact words used. The irony also functions on the narrative level,
determining characters in their various relations to one another and to life as a whole. To
achieve the continuity of a novel, Virginia Woolf required narrative links between their divided
worlds. The external time scheme, underlined by the stroke of Big Ben, places both the inner
and outer worlds of various characters in an identical framework. It matches Septimus’ sense
of an inner truth (the kind of truth for which Marlow searches in Conrad’s Heart of the
Darkness) with the entire social world of the Dalloway’s drawing room. Peter Walsh driving
to Clarissa’s party meets the ambulance carrying Septimus’s body. Finally, particular characters,
the psychiatrist Sir William Bradshaw most prominently among them communicate between
the two worlds. The interesting result is that out of a series of incomplete pieces a complete
whole is constructed.

30.4 Summary

• A theme of the novel is the conflict between conventionality and unconventionality.
• Clarissa’s principal servant, Lucy has the run of the house. She is proud of its ability to
effuse beauty and honor.
• Clarissa Dalloway, the heroine of the novel, struggles constantly to balance her internal
life with the external world.
• Septimus, a veteran of World War I, suffers from shell shock and is lost within his own
mind.
• Woolf laid out some of her literary goals with the characters of Mrs Dalloway while still
working on the novel.
• Virginia Woolf possesses the ability to create a work of fiction that evokes a pleasant
reading experience for the reader without utilizing a central plot.

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