Virginia Woolf's Narrative Style In Mrs. Dalloway

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Viginia Woolf possesses the ability to create a work of fiction that evokes a pleasant reading experience for the reader without utilizing a central plot. In Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf chooses to explore the narrative possibilities of bringing several characters through one single day in time. This narrative technique works well in a text that mainly focuses on Mrs. Dalloway's worldview, her inner workings, and her exploration and sensory experience of the world surrounding her.

Mrs. Dalloway does not tell an exciting story; very little happens to the characters. We, as the reader does not suffer an urgent desire to know what happens next. In a sense, Mrs. Dalloway is a novel without a plot. In the conventional novel, a sequence of events leads up to a climax and then a denouement provided a framework within which the whole resolution is contained. Every event in the novel is a logical outcome of the preceeding element. This logically connected pattern is absent in Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway.For example, the novel does tell us about long-standing problems (should Clarissa have married Peter Walsh? Does Peter Walsh have a flawed character?). But at the end of the novel, these problems are just as unresolved as they were at the beginning. It could be said that the other main story in the novel, that of Septimus Warren Smith's struggle with his madness and with his doctors, does have a culmination; it ends in Septimus's death and defeat. But even this apparently definitive ending, the ending of his life does not have the quality of traditional novel endings with a clear moral attached that we are expected to learn.Many questions remain unanswered at the end of the book and many areas of ambiguity remain unresolved.

Divided into parts, rather than chapters, the novel's structure highlights the finely intervowen texture of the character' thoughts.The interest in Mrs. Dalloway, then, is not so much on the action rather more emphasis is laid on various charcters' movements of consciousness (or streams of consciousness). As they move about London, meeting each other and performing their tasks, they are all living very complex subjective lives with streams of memories, fantasies, fears, excitements, fluctuating moods and changeable feelings.In other words, plot in Mrs. Dalloway is essentially internal. Woolf wanted to express a point of view, not a plot. There is not a single story in the novel rather stories of individuals.

Another technique that Virginia Woolf emplys to develop the story of the novel is her treatment of time. Apparently the time of action is only a single day in the lives of Clarissa Dalloway 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 agreat 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 world. The external time scheme, underlined by the stroke of Big Ben, place 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 charachers, 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.

From the above discussion, it is clear that though Mrs. Dalloway is without the conventional plot, yet there is unity present in the different events narrated in the novel. Through such an effort comes the only hope of structuring and molding the small and incoherent universe of one man to a purpose.