Mrs. Dalloway is a character very much concerned with outward appearances. The passage can be thought of as evidence of the public–private divide in that her thoughts about her own mortality are clearly private and that Woolf's narration here is clearly internal. Her concern about the relationship of her existence as a person to the reality of "the streets of London" is another expression of this public/private problem. For someone concerned with the external, the problem becomes one of whether reality is created by our existence in the world or if our existence is the result of external relations with things around us. Mrs. Dalloway, of course, has no answer to this, but it is a significant aspect of her character that this is a source of anxiety.

Woolf, on the other hand, is interested in the connectedness of the inside and the outside. Mrs. Dalloway's feeling that somehow she must "survive" in the "ebb and flow of things" is one of those remarkably double phrases in Woolf that requires substantial unpacking. In a way, Mrs. Dalloway's continuing on after death in the reality of things is an affirmation of her own external orientation. At the same time, this thought is both evidence of her private sensibility, something unshared with others, and a marker of Woolf's philosophic and aesthetic contention that "reality" is created by the interaction of the public and private.