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She felt somehow very like him—the young man who had killed himself. She felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away. The clock was striking. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. He made her feel the beauty; made her feel the fun. But she must go back. She must assemble.
This quotation occurs at the day’s end, when Clarissa is at her party and receives news of Septimus’s death from Lady Bradshaw. Clarissa retreats to the small room where the prime minister sat to reflect on the young veteran. She had never met him and does not even know his name, but she experiences a moment of clarity, or “moment of being,” in the small room when she identifies strongly with him and his dramatic action. Woolf created Septimus as Clarissa’s double, and throughout the book he has echoed her thoughts and feelings. In this scene, Clarissa realizes how much she has in common with this working-class young man, who on the surface seems so unlike her.
Everything converges in this one moment, and this scene
is the climax of the book. The narratives of Clarissa and Septimus
finally meet. A wall separates the public sphere of the party from
Clarissa’s private space, where her soul feels connected to Septimus’s
soul. The clocks that have been relentlessly structuring the passing
day continue to chime. Despite the sounding clocks and the pressures
of the party outside, however, Clarissa manages to appreciate that
Septimus has preserved his soul through death. Clarissa began her
day by plunging metaphorically into the beautiful June morning,
and Septimus has now literally plunged from his window. An effort
and commitment to the soul is necessary to plunge into life or death,
and Clarissa, who has reached middle age and is keenly aware of
the compromises she has made in her own life, respects Septimus’s unwillingness
to be crushed by an oppressive power like the psychiatrist Sir William.
Clarissa repeats the line from
