Mrs.Dalloway as a Stream of Conscious Novel or Psychological Novel

                       Mrs. Dalloway as a Stream of Consciousness Novel



                              William James in his Principal of Psychology (1890) used the phrase "Stream of Consciousness" to describe the unknown flow of perception, thoughts, and feeling in the waking mind. It has since been adopted to describe a narrative method in non-dramatic modern fiction had its birth between 1913 to 1915. Virginia Woolf uses this narrative method in many of her novels and Mrs. Dalloway is not an exception. Let us in the following paragraphs see and show how Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway can be called a Stream of Consciousness Novel.
                  
                 Virginia Wool's Mrs. Dalloway includes a distinctive narrative vogue, salient for its shifts in a point of view to occur within one same paragraph, accentuating the psychological and the analytical nature of the narrative.
To achieve a quick transition, Woolf uses a literary technique called free indirect speech. 

               Mrs. Dalloway refers to a story that captures a character's thoughts and uses them to say a story.
The novel addresses Clarissa Dalloway's preparation for a party she will host that evening. The nice day reminds her of her youth spent in Bourton and makes her wonder about the choice of her husband Richard over Peter or Sally Seton (a female friend). It also talks about Septimus Smith, a World War I veteran suffering from traumatic stress, who commits suicide. Clarissa's party is a slow success and she comes to know that the veteran has died, who is, in fact, a stranger to her. But this death affects her and she considers her suicide an act to preserve the purity of his happiness.

           The novel follows no conventional plot. Septimus's death is casually reported in the party. The play happens usually in a single day. But going by the psychological time, the characters' disorganized experience of the past which has an impression on their mind makes them be in the present through the past
and contemplate about the future. We move in Mrs.
Dalloway's mind as she is pondering about the myriad things around herAs David Daiches points out; "this technique of the stream of consciousness helps a person in the novel to move back and forth in time again and again".



         To conclude, Mrs. Dalloway is thus one of the best examples of the novel form of writing that uses the technique stream of consciousness to explore the inner life of the characters, expose their follies, frustration, and complexity.     

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