"... but I've felt it for some time now, closing around me like the jaws of a gigantic flower. Isn't that a peculiar analogy? It feels that way, though. It has a certain vegetable inevitability. Think of the Venus flytrap. Think of kudzu choking a forest. It's a sort of juicy, green, thriving progress. Toward well, you know. The green silence. Isn't it funny that, even now, it's difficult to say the word 'death'" (198)?
Richard's suicide parallels with Septimus' suicide because it has a resounding affect on both of the Clarissa's lives. For Clarissa Vaughan, she feels perplexed because Richard was someone who was very close to her, being lovers in their youth, which contrasts with Clarissa Dalloway's barely knowing Septimus at all. This proves that death, no matter who the person is or how close a relationship a person shares with them, is fascinating to humans because it is an end that is questionable if it is even an end at all.
Richard's simile of being being crushed by some huge flower essentially displays that death doesn't just come to a person and ends quickly, it is a process like the slow crushing of jaws, it slowly takes life from a person until they are gone. Michael Cunningham's use of the analogy with the flower, gives the motif of a flower deeper meaning because flowers are universally know for love and life but this use of the motif also gives flowers a darker meaning because they can also be deadly and express the pain and sadness associated with death.
Mortality continually fascinates humans because it seems like the end of everything we have come to know and experience in our lives. At the same time, we have yet to know what happens after. All we know is that time doesn't stop for death, everyone else keeps living on and other people keep living.
Richard's simile of being being crushed by some huge flower essentially displays that death doesn't just come to a person and ends quickly, it is a process like the slow crushing of jaws, it slowly takes life from a person until they are gone. Michael Cunningham's use of the analogy with the flower, gives the motif of a flower deeper meaning because flowers are universally know for love and life but this use of the motif also gives flowers a darker meaning because they can also be deadly and express the pain and sadness associated with death.
Mortality continually fascinates humans because it seems like the end of everything we have come to know and experience in our lives. At the same time, we have yet to know what happens after. All we know is that time doesn't stop for death, everyone else keeps living on and other people keep living.
“'Yes, Clarissa thinks, it's time for the day to be over. We throw our parties; we abandon our families to live alone in Canada; we struggle to write books that do not change the world, despite our gifts and our unstinting efforts, our most extravagant hopes. We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep. It’s as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out windows, or drown themselves, or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us are slowly devoured by some disease, or, if we’re very fortunate, by time itself. There’s just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we’ve ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) know these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult'” ( 225).
This passage parallels with the climax scene in Mrs. Dalloway, in the sense that, Septimus and Richard are supposed to be the same character and share similar feelings and actions. Even though in the party scene, where Clarissa Dalloway debates her life is the climax and resolve of the novel, Clarissa is still affected by Septimus' death because she see's how Septimus has changed because of time. Clarissa Vaughan experiences the same revelation as Clarissa Vaughan because of Richard's suicide; she watches him go from her lover in their youth at Wellfleet to an ill old man that stays in his apartment all day. The way time changes people as it goes on makes them contemplate their significance in the world which causes Virginia, Clarissa Dalloway, Clarissa Vaughan, and Laura Brown to feel oppressed by their lack of control over their lives and they feel like they can't add up to what is expected of them. Time controls everything and everything changes in time, just like the characters, we change and conform to time, even though it was created by us.