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The Two Halves of Mrs. Dalloway

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    In the novel Mrs. Dalloway , the story generally centers around two main characters: Clarissa Dalloway, a rich woman who buys flowers, wonders where her love truly lies, and throws a party, and Septimus Warren Smith, a philosophical man who struggles with PTSD in a time when he couldn't get the help he needed and jumps out of a window. The two never meet, yet Clarissa, in the middle of her party, grieves for this man (who wasn't even named!), creating the strangest and most moving moment in this novel. While they may seem extremely different at first glance, the entire book truly is built to make you feel like they are two halves of the same person.     Woolf herself said that Septimus initially wasn't even part of the plan, and Clarissa was actually intended to die. Septimus arrived later as a man who could carry that fate, so Clarissa didn't have to. That means that Septimus isn't a side character or a subplot; instead, he's the road that Clarissa didn...
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Notes on Footnotes

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     Some of the most interesting and entertaining parts of The Mezzanine come in the footnotes, which paradoxically often tell more story than the main content itself. There's no better example of this than Baker's amusing footnote digressing extensively on footnotes in text, which in fact tells us a lot about his opinions on the little things (literally).       After going on a tangent in a tangent about the odd hobbies of famous philosophers, we get back to the tangent about  tangents, which Howie describes as "encrusted with a rough protective bark of citations, quotation marks, italics, and foreign languages… that are the shield for the pure flow of argument as it lives for a moment in one mind" (Baker 122). Howie says that the "tiny type" enhances "the glee of reading works of obscure scholarship" which break up the "waggling back and forth in the Zs taught in grade school" with a "superscripted '1'" indicating “t...
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