The striking clock is part of “all this going on.” The rhythm of life did not stop with Septimus’s death; Clarissa must go back and assemble.The narrator of Mrs. Dalloway plunges us into a complex web of rhythms at the beginning of the novel. The rhythm of Clarissa’s past mingles with that of her present and sends her into the future. The polyrhythmic structure of the novel concludes with a new downbeat that unifies Clarissa, Peter, and Sally with their memories and their present moment and promises to launch into new rhythmic complexities. The mingling of all the disparate rhythms at Clarissa’s party builds to “a little blur of sound” that announces the coming of “a new rhythm.” We feel the expectation, the “terror” and “ecstasy,” the danger of chaos before the resolution of “the one” in the narrator’s final words:What is this terror? what is this ecstasy?…What is it that fills me with extraordinary excitement?
It is Clarissa, he said.For there she was.
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Ibid. The Diary of Virginia Woolf: Volume Two, 1920-1924. Ed. Anne Oliver Bell.
New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978.