Ironically, it was a gunshot — a multitude of them — which cut Septimus Smith's contact with reality. He is a casualty of the Great War, a victim of shell-shock, Nevertheless, he does not imagine the car's backfiring to be a gunshot. To him, the noise is the sound of a whip cracking ("The world has raised its whip; where will it descend?"). Everyone else is only startled; Septimus is terrified.
In this crowd scene of London, we have gone beyond the exterior of appearance and have had a glimpse into two private, inner worlds — Clarissa Dalloway's and Septimus Smith's. We have seen two confused and frightened people. They differ in degree, of course. Clarissa has been weakened by an illness and she is frightened and furious about Miss Kilman's "possession" of Elizabeth. But, as best she can, she attempts to keep her fears corralled and orderly. In contrast, Septimus' fears cannot be governed; they are too overpowering and chaotic. London, through Clarissa's eyes, is familiar and reassuring; for Septimus, it is only fragments of sensation. To Lucrezia, Septimus' wife, London seems totally alien. She is a stranger in a strange land, with no friends, and with a husband who threatens to kill himself.
Focusing on a simple morning scene, Virginia Woolf has challenged us with a many-prismed view: we wandered through Clarissa's wonderland of past and present thoughts; we drew back and saw the citizens of London react like one unified organism to a car backfiring; then we were jolted by the jagged reality of Septimus Smith's thoughts. Now we see what is happening through the eyes of a foreigner. So what is the "real world" like? Each person has a different idea of what truth and reality are. There is a general, agreed sense of what is true and real in a given situation but there are always highly individual interpretations. Virginia Woolf continually reminds us of such individual intricacies. One of the characters will frequently show us a sense of what is extraordinary in even the most mundane occurence. A car's backfiring is only a loud noise, yet it has unusual effects, individually, and it does something unusual to the mass of people who happen to be together on a London Street. The noise catches their attention, then the important-looking car mesmerizes them with awe. The car does not, for certain, contain anyone important, but everyone has deep veneration for it. And, from far above the story itself, we hear Virginia Woolf meditating, reflecting on the crowd's need to be associated with Greatness. The car is just a car — and even the Queen, if she be inside, is only a woman.
