Narrative technique

Mrs. Dalloway, like many modernist novels, such as James

Joyce’s A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man or Ulysses,
has no definite story or plot line. It begins abruptly in a
morning when Clarissa Dalloway goes to buy flowers for an
evening party she will host. As the day continues the reader is
led without constraint from Clarissa’s stream of consciousness
to Septimus’ to Peter’s and to those of the people they
encounter during the day. The novel undecidedly ends with
the party where all the people that have appeared during the
day are assembled, except for Septimus, since he killed
himself that afternoon, when the doctor came to take him
away to a mental home. He is “present” at the party only in
Doctor Bradshaw’s explanation of why he is so late.
Woolf uses Multiple narrative point of view instead of a
reliable, omniscient narrator, and no chronological ordering of
material. “Epistemological uncertainty” or “everlasting doubt
about knowing” most remarkably differentiates the modernists
from the realists. This is why the omniscient narrator is
replaced by the streams of consciousness of the characters,
which are all interlinked. Mrs. Dalloway’s social image
conceals incompatible aspects of her personality which could
be refracted into divergent and contradictory images. Each of
the other characters sees only one of these incompatible
aspects and takes this to be her total personality. Thus, as the
novel progresses, the early static image in the mirror gives
way to a series of shifting and contradictory views of Mrs.
Dalloway, and her identity expands to encompass all the
divergent images while remaining unencompassed by them.
Woolf’s narrative strategy is to follow the stream of
consciousness of her characters and not what is perceived as
‘truth’, as it was for the realists. Her narrative focus is on how
they observe and how they feel doing so. This technique
allows for consideration and reconsideration, for conjecture
and refutation without any definite conclusion. Through the
use of the stream of consciousness the focalisation shifts and
characters alternate between their subject and object roles.
One of Woolf’s techniques in the stream of consciousness
mode is “to burrow into characters’ pasts in order to unearth
their history”. She calls this process “tunnelling” - revealing
her characters to the readers as split beings who live both in
the past and in the present. Their current thoughts tell the
reader who they are, but their memories of the past reveal how
they came to be who they are and in this way the memories
explain to the reader why the characters are as they are. The
consciousness of a character thus becomes visible in Woolf’s
writing.
Most of the novel centers around Clarissa’s thoughts about the
past, mainly when she is thinking whether she would be with
Peter or with her husband, her rejection of Peter’s proposal of
marriage influencing all his later thoughts and actions. Stream
of consciousness is also used to record Septimus’ thoughts
about death and the war.
As in Joyce’s Portrait, Woolf uses both free indirect discourse
and interior monologue for the stream of consciousness mode,
shifting seamlessly between the two and merging the interior
private time and the exterior public time. The
interconnections are often framed, at their simplest, by a
shared occurrence or spatial environment, such as the
aeroplane, the prime-minister’s car and the chiming of Big
Ben that momentarily draw the attention of disparate figures
in the city streets, but they are also developed through patterns
of common and recurring mental images and phrases that
serve to link even characters who never meet, such as Clarrisa
and the shell-shocked Septimus Smith. This aspect of Woolf’s
narrative technique concerns her use of the setting – the
bustling London milieu.
Woolf makes the London milieu vibrate through the
consciousness of her characters who emotionally respond
differently to the different symbolic elements in this milieu.
Woolf uses the web of consciousness about the milieu as a
means of unifying the plot by intersecting the lives of
Clarissa, Septimus and Peter in that web throughout the day.
As the threads of their lives are woven in and out of the
common London milieu, we see a rich tapestry of life in
London from the point of view of these three disparate
characters.
Intersecting with Clarissa's walk is the journey of the shell-
shocked war veteran Septimus Warren Smith and his Italian
wife, Rezia. The same London milieu appears differently to
Septimus. For example, he reacts differently to the back fire
of a grand passing car which prompts people in the street,
including Clarissa, to believe that it may carry the queen or a
high-ranking government official, because they want
desperately to believe that meaning still exists in tradition and
in the figureheads of England. But for Septimus the grey car
seems threatening to create a scene about to burst into flame.
He has lost faith in the symbols Clarissa and others still cling
to.
Other characters are plotted precisely as they walk - across
Green Park - along Fleet Street. Peter Walsh, Clarissa’s
intimate friend since long before her marriage, casually
meanders through London streets. As he does so, he is more
interested in the “state of the world” than in the physical
trapping of the city. He wonders about the mechanics and
gasoline consumption of cars; he surmises about the lives of
the young soldiers marching past him and is reminded of his
own age. He feels young again. The atmosphere induces him
to act in a carefree manner by following a young lady through
the streets and fantasizing about an encounter with her in his
anonymous identity of “You”.
Another London site of intersection of characters is Regent’s
Park. Different characters respond differently to the park’s
atmosphere. Clarissa seems unaffected by the serenity of the
park, except for a cursory acknowledgment of the “silence;
the mist; the hum; the slow-swimming happy ducks; the
pouched birds waddling”. She is more interested in the social
encounter with her friend, Hugh Whitbread, and what he may
think of her and the hat she is wearing. Hugh’s presence in the
Park reminds her of happier times at Bourton where they
spent considerable time together on the lawns and gardens.
The normal everyday life in Regent’s Park, however, feeds
the injured, shell-shocked Septimus’ psychosis to a point
where he sees everything as a threat to him. He experiences
hallucination of trees being alive and connected to him by
“millions of fibres”; birds singing to him in Greek; a dog
turning into a man; promises of beauty from the smoke of the
sky-writing plane, and ultimately Peter Walsh seeming to take
the form of Septimus’ friend Evans, who was killed in the
war. Septimus is unable to bear the life in London, as he
perceives it, and horrified by the prospect of an isolated
soulless existence controlled by London psychiatrists in
mental asylum, he commits suicide to sacrifice his body rather
than his soul. So it can be said that Septimus is swallowed up
by London.
The chimes of the Big Ben, heard all over London, not only
mark time for all Londoners, but also mark the presence of
authority, the power and glory of the British Empire, keeping
its own standard time. Likewise each of the London
landmarks represents a symbolic value. For example, the
statues of famous generals and leaders in Trafalgar Square
suggest the importance of patriotism to the British way of life.
The solemn and respectful atmosphere of a small crowd
gathered before the Buckingham Palace highlights the
crowd’s consciousness of the importance of the royal house.
However, by introducing certain details such as ‘the Queen’s
old doll’s house’ and the Prince who took after King Edward
but was ‘ever so slimmer’, Woolf diminishes and to some
extent subtly ridicules the royal house and its members. That
the crowd was increased ‘by men without occupation’ adds a
trace of the political. Constant oppositions in the account of
the cityscape also emphasise the political consciousness of the
narrator: ‘thin trees’ are opposed to the sculptures of ‘bronze
heroes’, while the crowd is contrasted with the highly revered
royal house individuals. On the other hand, these feelings are
perceived through the individualised members of the crowd
(Moll Pratt, Sarah Bletchley, Emily Coates, Mr Bowley) and
though minimal, there is some insight into their
consciousness, while the members of the royal family remain
mysterious and are mentioned either by their titles or names
but with no insight into their psychological identities.
In the wailing siren of the ambulance carrying Septimus’s
body, Peter hears all that is good about English society—its
humanity, efficiency, and compassion. However, Septimus
found those same things constricting and deadening, not
liberating and inspiring. Septimus fought to preserve these
virtues during the war, and they eventually became hollow
and meaningless to him. Peter hears humanity in the
ambulance siren, but the inhumanity of the English medical
system played a part in Septimus’s death. So, while to
Clarissa and Peter, London is promising and joyous, it is
nevertheless threatening and devastating for it ‘has swallowed
up many millions of young men called Smith’. By depicting
Septimus’ disintegrating personality, that is, his mindscape,
Woolf depicts the disintegration of post-war London and its
inhabitants. Thus both the external London milieu and its
internal mindscapes in Mrs Dalloway are represented in the
mode of modernist vision as fragmented, chaotic and
disorderly, caused by the disillusioning effect of war
devastations and post-World War I crisis.

Finally, Woolf’s narrative technique is a challenging one for

the reader who must, while reading the novel, be constantly
on alert as to what is going on, where and when; who is
speaking about whom or what and why.