Richard

Mrs. Dalloway is an interesting book to read after The Mezzanine because while both books focus on really delving into certain subjects and exploring their connections, Nicholson Baker writes about objects and Virginia Woolf writes about people. And while I enjoyed reading about staplers, humans are much more deep and complex. I found Virginia Woolf managed to make all the characters in Mrs. Dalloway intriguing and worth reading about, one character who I found interesting in his relative simplicity was Richard Dalloway.

The novel starts with describing Clarissa's everyday actions, but it soon gets into her mind and how she considers what her life would have been like had she married someone else and various other reflections back on her earlier life. Peter, another character who gets a lot of pages about his thoughts, similarly reflects back a lot on previous times and revisits positions on people in his mind over and over, especially going over Clarissa and going back and forth on whether she's snobby, judgmental, charming, kind, etc. Richard, on the other hand, does none of this. I have very little idea of what his life was like and his experiences at Bourton. You get a sense from the other characters' memories, but in the relatively short time that Woolf delves into his thoughts, he never really things back to the past except to consider that hey, everything turned out pretty ok -- "his life had been a miracle, he thought." This isn't really an exceptional stretch of the imagination, as he has a nice wife, a daughter, a good job, and as Lady Bruton says, is in the "pink of condition." However, several characters mention that he has fallen short of some office (I forget what), and Richard's view shows a definite optimism. He's sure of his miracle of his life, too, which sort of stands out against Clarissa's constant "I guess I'm happy now but I wonder where I would be if I married Peter." Richard isn't happy about everything, but he only seems to have minor annoyances, such as Hugh the "intolerable ass." While Clarissa has intense feelings about Miss Kilman, Richard certainly doesn't like it but "these things pass over if you let them."

One thing I found kind of endearing about Richard was the way he thought about Clarissa and Elizabeth. They both came up naturally in his head and both times he got this rush of gratitude. Whereas Clarissa and Elizabeth considered people in a more complex and decidedly cooler way, Richard just seemed very happy that they were in his life.

I really enjoyed seeing the thoughts of all the characters in this novel. I thought Septimus was really interesting but his perspective was intense and almost exhausting, whereas Richard has, as Clarissa says, an "adorable, divine simplicity."