In her 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf is so meticulous in her examination of a day that she is able to deconstruct and examine the entire life and identity of her personages. Woolf seeks to dive beneath the surface of everyday life to extract meaning from the seemingly monotonous depths of an English society struggling in the wake of the most devastating war the world has ever seen. The reader is given access to the meandering thoughts of Woolf's characters, and although Big Ben regularly marks the passing hours, the linear nature of time is called into question as the characters are unable to separate their memories of the past from their visions of the past. the present. Woolf's characters are complex and emotional, but their lives are exclusively internal and isolated. Burdened by their thoughts and their pasts, the characters find themselves drowned in their own minds, unable to transform desires into actions and change the circumstances by which they feel repressed. Ms. Dalloway explores how the inability to communicate and act against an unsatisfactory reality renders the individual – or “the self” – irrelevant and powerless. Mrs Dalloway's characters embark on meandering mental journeys that ultimately lead nowhere. of tangible action, demonstrating their inability to affect change in their external environment. The characters lack the ability to communicate with the outside, and as such, their internal revelations remain unnoticed and unimportant to the people around them. The illusion of meaning where there is none is an underlying theme of the novel. Peter Walsh proves this when he spends half an hour chasing an attractive... middle of paper... and the future slips away from him just like Clarissa did all those years ago. Woolf's characters, unable to accept the inexorable and "irrevocable" flow of time, find themselves stuck in the past and consequently the meaning of their existence is swept away, demonstrating how an individual can lose himself forever in an instant if allows. last too long. Virginia Woolf tackles frequently asked questions about the true meaning of life, but it is the way she does so - exploring the simplest circumstances rather than the most extraordinary - that makes Mrs Dalloway so unique. Woolf's immersion in her characters' minds - in life itself - reveals the dangerously immeasurable scope of the mind's complexity, demonstrating that one's existence can be rendered meaningless if one becomes absorbed in its thoughts and experiences..