In the Regent's Park episode we are privy to Peter Walsh's stream of consciousness thoughts, and Peter, Rezia, and Septimus briefly see each other, though they don't know each other.

In Mrs. Dalloway (and Jacob's Room), Woolf has reached her mature style after experimenting with it in short stories. In the Regent's Park scene, as in the rest of the novel, she has cut out the nineteenth century omniscient narrator who knows all that is going on and tells us what is happening and what it means. In Mrs. Dalloway, we only learn what is going on through the thoughts and dialogue of the characters. Therefore, in this scene, we learn about Peter solely through his thoughts and actions. It is left up to readers to interpret what these mean. For example, when he follows a pretty girl he sees, is this unconventional behavior a sign of his freedom, his loneliness, his inchoate desires, or his unreflected patriarchal privilege that leads him to believe he can act on his impulses, even if his impulses are a little creepy? It is probably all of these—and more—but Woolf refuses to contain and limit the complexity of Peter's actions by telling us what they mean through an authoritative narrator.

In this section, as in others, Woolf is trying to convey the fluid nature of human identity. We are the past, we are the present, we are what other people think we are, and what we think we are; we are ever changing, like water, from moment to moment. As Mrs. Dalloway thinks as she is getting flowers, she will never say "I am this, I am that." She knows she can't fix her identity or another person's.

When Rezia glimpses Peter in Regent's Park, she thinks he looks like a "kind" man. He, in turn, thinks she and Septimus are a happy and free young couple, unlike him. This goes to another part of what Woolf was trying to show through her subjective narrative form: we can never fully know each other. Novels with omniscient narrators who tell us what characters are like miss this aspect of reality, this unknowability.

Explain the narrative mode of Mrs. Dalloway using the Regent's Park episode as an example.

Virginia Woolf's 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway is arguably her masterpiece and her most influential work. It is notable for its unconventional structure and experimental narrative technique. As such, it is an excellent example of aesthetic modernism. Set on one day in London, the book employs a stream-of-consciousness style, although in a very different way than another famous novel that takes place in one day, Joyce's Ulysses.

Woolf was trying to go deeper into how humans think and feel than previous novelists and realized that traditional narrative techniques were inadequate to do so. In the Regent's Park episode, Lucrezia "Rezia" Smith, an Italian woman, and her husband, a World War I veteran named Septimus Smith, are walking in the park. Woolf was very interested in the mental states of her characters, and both Smiths suffer; Rezia is somewhat mentally unstable, while Septimus is shell-shocked from his war experiences. Woolf puts us into the thoughts of Rezia and, like real thoughts, they are not organized or linear. She misses her native country, Italy, thinks about nature, and feels lonely. Woolf balances Rezia's thoughts and feelings with the very simple plot of the episode, which is a walk in Regent's Park in London. Woolf, who opined, "On or around December 1910 human character changed," shows in this episode how profound thoughts can occur in even the most ordinary circumstances.