Themes

Annotations:

• Character's are trying to find outlets for communication, yet also struggle to have privacy.
• "the solitary traveller" "every one gives up something when they marry" "are we not all prisoners?... one scratched on the wall"

1. Clarissa
   1. Lonliness in head

      Annotations:

      • The woman across the street is the human mystery - that they can exist separately. However this independence leads to inevitable loneliness.
      • "her attic room" "far out to sea and alone"
   2. Her party

      Annotations:

      • Clarissa throws her party to try and bring people together, to try and give herself a purpose.  "cutting them up and sticking them together again"
      • "she would be nothing without her parties" CHECK  "the sheets were clean, tight stretched... narrower and narrower would her bed be" "to kindle and illuminate" 
2. Peter

   Annotations:

   • Communication and privacy is a human impulse
   • "in privacy one may do as one chooses" "their desire, pulsing in them, tugging at them subterraneously, somehow to establish connections" "our soul... who fish-like inhabits deep seas and... threading her way between the boles of giant weeds... suddenly she shoots to the surface" "nothing exists outside us except a state of mind"
3. Septimus' suicide

   Annotations:

   • Septimus' suicide is a desperate attempt to communicate with the world, to establish a connection, to have people understand him.  He succeeds with Clarissa 
   • "death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate... there was an embrace in death" "She walked to the window... she felt somehow very like him"

Annotations:

• "the millions lamented; for ages they had sorrowed" "This late age of world's experience had bred in them all, all men and women, a well of tears" "Every one has friends who were killed in the war"

1. Faith in class system

   Annotations:

   • what with "temparory gentlemen" both classes are now seeing possible future. For example, link to Elisabeth
2. Richard's plan to write a history book
3. Septimus' shell shock

   Annotations:

   • "he never spoke of 'madness'; he called it not having a sense of proportion" "he saw an old woman's head in a fern"

Annotations:

• "how it is certain we must die" "to live even one day is dangerous" CHECK

1. Big Ben

   Annotations:

   • Represents time moving on endlessly towards death
   • "First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air" "fear no more the heat of the sun"
2. Septimus

   Annotations:

   • Chooses death over the terror of living
   • "Death was defiance"
3. In party

   Annotations:

   • "In the middle of my party, here's death" "she thought of her mother and tears were brought to her eyes" CHECK

1. Miss Kilman
   1. On her

      Annotations:

      • Had to leave school because she wouldn't say that all Germans are evil
   2. From her onto Clarissa

      Annotations:

      • Would like to see Clarissa become Christian. Takes Elisabeth away from her
      • "her enemy"
2. William Bradshaw / Dr Holmes

   Annotations:

   • See medical profession
3. Clarissa supporting class system

   Annotations:

   • Suppresses Septimus; in a society where he is trying to conform
   • "somehow it was her disaster - her disgrace"

1. The PM

   Annotations:

   • "the proime ministers kyar" "He looked so ordinary" "this symbol of what they all stood for, English society" Westminster
2. Monarchy

   Annotations:

   • Buckingham palace
3. Medical profession

   Annotations:

   • "they hunt in packs" "He swooped; he devoured" "life is made intolerable "Human nature, in short, was on him - the repulsive brute, with the blood-red nostrils"

Annotations:

• "to know... any one, one must seek out the people who completed them; even the places."

1. Bourton

   Annotations:

   • The novel is constantly look back at Bourton to reflect on what could have been
   • "at this age they would have been arguing every night"
2. New generation

   Annotations:

   • The war has created a new generation of people with different ideas. They struggle to (LK) communicate with the older, traditional generation
   • "people looked different. Newspapers seemed different"
   1. Elisabeth

      Annotations:

      • "maybe she would become a doctor"