Mrs Dalloway as a novel without a traditional plot.

In a sense, Mrs. Dalloway is a novel without a plot. Instead of creating major

situations between characters to push the story forward, Woolf moved her narrative
by following the passing hours of a day. The book is composed of movements from
one character to another, or of movements from the internal thoughts of one character
to the internal thoughts of another.
Mrs. Dalloway has been called a flâneur novel, which means it depicts people
walking about a city. (Flâneur is the French word for a person who enjoys walking
around a city often with no other purpose than to see the sights.) The book, as is typi-
cal of the flâneur novel, makes the city, its parks, and its streets as interesting as the
characters who inhabit them.
Clarissa Dalloway's party, which is the culminating event of the book, ties the
narrative together by gathering the group of friends Clarissa thinks about throughout
her day. It also concludes the secondary story of the book, the story of Septimus
Warren Smith, by having Dr. Bradshaw arrive at the party and mention that one of his
patients committed suicide that day.

It was without doubt an intellectual and well-ordered novel, granted P.C. Kennedy in
his contemporary review – but “there are no people”. By which he meant characters a
reader like himself could easily identify with. Virginia Woolf’s archrival, Arnold
Bennett, about whom she would write scathingly (and amusingly), snorted angrily 5
that he couldn’t finish the damn thing because there was no logical “construction”.
Where was Woolf’s story going? Was there a story? For Bennett, Mrs Dalloway
was a novel without “plot”: for Kennedy it was a novel without “characters”.
to develop round, dynamic characters that convincingly express the reality of their
existence on the page

One of the most important artistic influences of the novel is Impressionism. The term
first appeared at the end of the 19th century to describe a group of paintings, whose
aim was to show usual things at unusual angles, to show them as literally "still-lives",
and to convey the emotion of the depicted moment. The artists of this movement,
among whom are Édouard Manet, Claude Monet and Edgar Degas, often
experimented with light, angles, and subject matter of the paintings. The
impressionists rejected the idea of a "message" in a work of art, their paintings are
often blurred and at times not quite graspable. They believed there shouldn't be any
"plot", just a sketch of life. A thought is substituted by impression, reason — by
instinct.
Clarissa Dalloway, the main character of Woolf's novel, sees the world in a very
similar way, and Woolf's mastery is in verbalising this extreme beauty of a moment:

Another major influence for Virginia Woolf was Cubism, another art movement,
which, unlike Impressionism, tries to depict an object from numerous different
viewpoints. In other words, cubists try to represent an object in space from several
different angles and perspectives, taken at different times.
Cubist influence can be seen in the novel in the way Woolf constantly switches
between different narrators and describes objects from their viewpoint. An example
of this is technique is the episode with "sky-writing", where an advertisement plane
flies over London:
But every person who looks at the aeroplane sees different "writing". Mrs Coates, a
woman with a baby, sees in the writing the word "Glaxo", the name of the baby food
manufacturer. Many people see the advertisement for "toffees". But for Septimus, a
war veteran who suffers from shell shock, these are personal messages from the gods: