I noticed as I started to get further into Mrs. Dalloway that the writing made me slightly uncomfortable.  There are no chapters, but a constant stream of description about one character’s thoughts and actions as a focal point to the next.  Automatically, my original thought was that this was written in stream of consciousness form, as we discussed in class; however, Mrs. Dalloway is not written in first person, which is a requirement of stream of consciousness.  Virginia Woolf wrote this novel in what is called free and direct discourse which is written in third person omniscient.  While I thought Mrs. Dalloway was somewhat hard to read at times because of its continuous action, I respect it for its unique form.

Additionally, my first judgement of Clarissa was that she was a young girl, whereas Septimus was an older man, perhaps in his fifties.  These initial judgements were wrong and quite the opposite.  We touched lightly upon this in class, but I do think it has to deal with each character’s experience in the world.  Clarissa is mostly busy hosting parties, and so she lacks any real knowledge of what goes on outside of her upper class life.  Septimus, being a war veteran, deals with having too much knowledge and experience of the horrors of the world.