Time acts as the major structural organizational element in Mrs. Dalloway. Discuss with reference to the technique of flashback fits into this frame.

Time (and the passage of time) is one of the most important themes in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. More specifically, the novel is largely about middle-aged people thinking about their youth and measuring up their present life with their past dreams and ambitions. Indeed, on the very first page, Clarissa Dalloway is whisked back to her youth at Bourton, remembering her exuberant, younger self and her past relationship with Peter Walsh (3-4). Woolf repeatedly uses flashbacks throughout the book, most often to explore the past selves of Clarissa and Peter Walsh, but also to explore the lives of other characters. The concept of time in Mrs. Dalloway becomes very muddy indeed, with the past intruding constantly on present events, sometimes even taking over the present for long stretches, as when Clarissa reflects on her past relationship with Sally Seton (32-36). In that case, even though characters in the book are constantly worried about their inevitable mortality—Clarissa knows that she must die and cease to exist (9)—Woolf suggests through her use of flashbacks that the past does not merely stop existing, but rather is sustained somehow into the present via human memory. Therefore, if Mrs. Dalloway is a book about middle age and mortality, then it is also a book about how one can disrupt time and how the past never stops existing as long as we remember it.