Mrs. Dalloway 136-190 (end)

Septimus's suicide:

• He goes from being so happy and joking with his wife (which he hasn't done since he went crazy) to being hit by the isolation/ memory of Evans again
• "He did not want to die. Life was good...Coming down the staircase opposite an old man stopped and stared at him. Holmes was at the door. 'I'll give it to you!' he cried, and flung himself vigorously, violently down onto Mrs. Filmer's area railings"
• Kind of a choice between killing his body (throwing himself out the window) and killing his soul (by submitting to Holmes's treatment)
• Like Clarissa nearer to the beginning, wakes up feeling empty, both watch someone through a window, but the old woman is in her home happy and the old man is leaving his home... 
• Why does he say "I'll give it to you"? Who is he speaking to?
• What is the significance of the railing/ throwing himself outside?

Peter

• sees good in humanity where Septimus sees bad things; he sees the ambulance as "one of the triumphs of civilisation" (147)
• Septimus killed himself because of medical things

Party!

• seems really extravagant after Septimus's death
• Clarissa has bad thoughts about life again; "Why, after all, did she do these things? Why seek pinnacles and stand drenched in fire? Might it consumer her anyhow! Burn her to cinders!...Life was that--humiliation, renunciation" (163-4).
• a lot of characters have morbid thoughts like this I think; it's interesting that it shows everyone's insecurities because in real life we sometimes don't see those things at all (Mrs. Kilman doesn't see Clarissa's misery at all)
• Clarissa's reaction to the news of suicide
• She can't get over the fact that the "Bradshaws talked of it at her party" (179)
• She sees it as "her disaster--her disgrace. It was her punishment to see sink and disappear here a man, there a woman, in this profound darkness, and she forced to stand here in her evening dress. She had schemed, she had pilfered. She was never wholly admirable. She had wanted success" (181)
• She realizes how trivial her life is; she only wanted social status and becomes ashamed of her life
• Realizes that she could die, and if she did then she would be happy in death; Othello quote 180
• "She felt somehow 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" (182)
• Why is she happy he killed himself?
• Accepts aging/death; feels comforted in the fact that he took his life makes it easier for her to accept that she will die eventually
• When she returns, everything is from Peter's point of view; why?