How did Vriginia Woolf manage to do this? By the use of an omniscient third person narrator, who has access to the thoughts, respectively to the mind, of all characters, and who relates the story from the point of view of these various characters. As a consequence of this, the reader experiences the story from different subjective consciousnesses, each of them interpreting circumstances and persons differently. So there is no objective reality in the novel, and the reader cannot say for sure that a character is like this or that, but he has to rely on the novel´s character´s impressions and on his sense of sympathy. The reader has to form his own judgment. Thereby Virginia Woolf uses connecting devices like the common past of certain characters, or public events attended by several characters, in order to procure for the reader an insight into how each character experiences a certain issue, and what their respective thoughts on the occurring issues are. Such a connecting device is presented when Clarissa Dalloway is at the flower shop, when suddenly a car backfires in front of the flower shop. The car does not draw only Clarissa´s attention, but also that of the strollers outside the flower shop, among which Septimus Warren Smith, the shell-shocked World War I veteran, is present. So the car serves as a connection point insofar as the narrator shifts between the minds of Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus, allowing the reader an insight of how both of them experience this situation. The backfiring of the car scares Clarissa for a moment and persuades her to think that she heard "a pistol shot in the street outside" (14), presumably this thought is set off by the unconsciously persisting fear of World War I, although the war is over. But then as she sees the fancy car outside, she wonders like most of the others if it is the Queen, or any other person from the government, inside the car.
