Mrs. Dalloway

I hope you are enjoying Mrs. Dalloway. Over the next few days I'm going to be beginning some threads on a few of the works we have been reading. I have been meaning to do this but a combination of illness and midterm grading has resulted in a slight delay. Ryan was good enough to start a thread on Wilfred Owen, and Emily posted a very thoughtful response to Joyce, so I won't need to start new threads there (though I would like to encourage a dialogue, especially on "The Dead," which we were unable to discuss in class), but I will be posing some questions about Conrad, Eliot, Yeats, and Woolf.

1. One thing you have no doubt noticed about Mrs. Dalloway is that there is no real plot, or at least the plot is very thin. This can be a bit surprising, even offputting, for readers who are used to a traditional plot line. Every work of fiction needs some kind of engine, something that makes the reader want to turn the next page. If it lacks this engine, a story or novel will not succeed because the reader will put it down. So here is my question: What is the engine in Mrs. Dalloway? What makes you want to keep reading? (Or, if you hate the novel, you can write about why you don't want to keep reading). If this is not a plot-driven novel, what kind of novel is it?

2. Mrs. Dalloway seems to be very random at times, jumping in and out of characters' minds. Can you discern any rhyme or reason to this? Are these characters connected in any way? I realize you have probably not finished the novel since you only needed to read part of it for today, but try to draw some connections between the characters and/or their stories if you feel these connections exist.

3. Do you see any similarities between Mrs. Dalloway and The Dead?

4. In one sense, we can think of Clarissa and Mrs. Dalloway as two separate characters in the novel (see the bottom of 2560: "She had the oddest sense of being herself invisible, unseen; unknown [. . .] this being Mrs. Dalloway; not even Clarissa any more; this being Mrs. Richard Dalloway). If we accept this premise as true, what are the characteristics of each woman?

5. How is the theme of memory/reflection/nostalgia important to the story? And is it just a theme, or is more than this?

There is more I want to ask, but I can't really ask it without giving away the rest of the novel. I will post a Part II on Thursday.