So far, I haven't had strongly disliked any of the characters, but I haven't found myself drawn to any of them either. That is, until Richard Dalloway came into the story.
He seems to be one of the few characters that's more or less content with life. He does reflect on the past, but his reflections have a much different tone than Clarissa's do. While Clarissa dwells on missed opportunities and regrets (although that might be too strong of a word), Richard thinks back fondly on his youth. He also flashes back momentarily to a time when he bought Clarissa a bracelet, that she now never wears. While he wasn't angry about this, he was definitely disappointed. His emotions regarding that incident weren't conveyed very strongly and I found myself wishing that I could step in and stand up for him.
I was actually expecting to really dislike him. From the way that Clarissa portrayed him, I was under the impression that he would be one of the distant husbands that only cares about work and his important, high-class friends. But, I was pleasantly surprised when he was introduced as a fairly laid-back and amiable person.
There was only one section in last night's reading that made me a little irritated with Richard. And that was when he couldn't say "I love you" to Clarissa. I'm sure that she knows that he loves her, but I don't understand why he froze up. That passage definitely stood out to me, but I'm still not quite sure how to interpret it.
1 comment:
I agree that it's deeply disappointing when Richard can't bring himself to say "I love you" (in so many words) to his wife of more than twenty years. After watching him work himself up to the surprisingly daunting task, we want to see him follow through! But it's also sort of endearing, he's so helpless and inept--it's similar to his memory of the bracelet. Now, it might seem cruel or ungrateful for Clarissa to never wear the bracelet he chose for her (and she never mentions it, that I can remember). But surely she's not being cruel intentionally, and maybe he just picked out a truly god-awful-ugly bracelet! He *tries*, but he's sort of endearingly inept at this stuff. Yet Woolf shows how Clarissa "understood" regardless; he manages to make his feelings known without using "so many words."
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