Mike: The Odd Man Out

During the preparations for the trip to Spain, we were introduced to two new main characters, Bill and Mike. While Bill is very entertaining with his irony, I've personally found Mike to be a far more interesting character. The type of relationship he has with Brett and his level of awareness of it, as well as how he fits into the rest of the group with Jake, Bill, and Cohn, make him a great character to read about.

The first thing that I noticed about Mike is that his style of speaking makes him seem rather unintelligent most of the time. He tends to say sort of stupid, extremely obvious things that don't need to be said, and, more prominently, he repeats things a huge amount. He calls Brett "a lovely piece" a total of five or six times in a stretch about a page long the first time we meet him, and keeps doing this kind of thing from then on. This repetition may be in part a result of him being drunk, which he pretty much always is in the book.

Even among this group of privileged party-goers, Mike stands out from the rest as not having a real purpose in life. He's always drunk, he no longer has a job, and he doesn't seem to have any real ambition or passions; he's just along for the ride with Brett. He also seem to be almost comically bad at everything he does; the first thing that we hear about him is that he got injured while attempting to help an old woman with her bags. This is a man who manages to go broke both gradually and suddenly at the same time. Brett also asks him to tell a bunch of stories about the war that are presumably about his incompetence; he doesn't want to tell them because they "reflect discredit" on him.

Brett's relationship with Michael is very interesting. Brett seems to be at least fond of Mike, and seem him as a good friend, but it's clear that she is at least in part marrying him for his family's money. She's not really emotionally attached to him, and has no discomfort with pursuing other men, even with Romero where Mike is there with her. Mike is aware of these relationships; Brett freely tells him all about them. He generally doesn't seem to have a problem with them; he understands the nature of the relationship and seems satisfied that he's going to be able to marry such "a lovely piece." Brett and Mike "understand each other." Cohn, however, is one man that's had an affair with Brett that he can't stand, because he's still hanging around her afterwards.

Mike is extremely hostile to Cohn, and even tries to fight him a couple times. He might have problems with Cohn because of his annoying personality and superior attitude, but I think that his main anger with Cohn is more because of what he represents. Before, he could sort of ignore the affairs that Brett had, but it's impossible to now that Cohn is physically there with them. He's thinking more about the nature of his relationship with Brett, and he's perhaps getting insecure, which is making him angry. It'll be interesting to see if Mike and Cohn eventually have a real fight over Brett, as I think that the story's leading there.

Mike seems to generally get along with the rest of the group, but there's not any special friendship there like there is between Jake and Bill. They seem to see him as a pretty cool guy, one that's fun normally but can get very annoying when too drunk. Jake, Bill, and Brett also all support his attacks on Cohn to some level. Mike, on the other hand, really wants to be fully part into the group and be one of the guys. From his checking several times to make sure they don't mind him coming on the trip to his pausing to make sure everyone's laughing during his stories, it's clear that he craves acceptance. This most evident when he's on the verge of tears while trying to get Jake to side with him about Cohn. Mike just isn't as "cool" a person as the rest of the group it seems; he's desperate to be liked and to it in but he's sort of left out.

Septimus' Role in Clarissa's Story

While reading through Mrs. Dalloway, a lot of people, myself included, questioned why Septimus was in the novel, as until the very end he sort of seemed like a very separate story. When Clarissa was told about his suicide and the connection became evident, a fairly prominent theory for his role in the story was that his personality was there to represent or reflect a part of Clarissa's. The sections involving Septimus were by far my favorite in the book, as his sort of crazy perspective was very interesting, and I actually felt much more invested in his story than Clarissa's, which I found less important. I don't agree with the theory that he represents a "darker side" of Clarissa, as I don't think they have a ton in common, and I think that Septimus was a completely separate person, and that it's how his story impacts Clarissa that reflects on her personality.

There are some obvious parallels between Septimus' suicide and Clarissa's moment at the window; Clarissa can for some reason perfectly visualize Septimus' fall, both of them at least consider dying as an act of "defiance," and, strangely, both see people across from them in different houses looking at them at the moment they're considering suicide. For me, the connections stop when I consider the character's motivations during these scenes. While they both seem to be sort of tired or fed up with life, this is for completely different reasons.

Septimus pretty clearly explains his reasons for committing suicide to the reader; he both feels that he committed a terrible crime against humanity for which he deserves to die and that he wants to have some control over his fate rather than let the doctors take control of him. We see during the course of the novel that his shell shock has greatly affected him and made him somewhat insane, which is evident in his narration. He seems to be at least partially recovering from this right before his jump out of the window, but the arrival of Doctor Holmes makes him want to escape and sort of rekindles these feelings again, leading him to kill himself.

Clarissa, on the other hand, just seems sort of bored and like she doesn't have a purpose, and she also is feeling some regret about the way her life has gone. She doesn't exhibit any signs of insanity even close to those Septimus does because of his shell shock. When she's thinking about Septimus' death alone in the room at the party, some of her potential motivations for suicide become clear. She mentions her moment at Bourton where she would have been happy dying, and I think that this news of Septimus sort of brings back that feeling, leading her to consider jumping. She thinks about the years of her life she's spent with Richard and how none of it compared to how good her time at Bourton was, and that seems to lead her into a lot of regret and sadness (one other potential motivation, which I thought of as she was describing death as a means of communication, is to prove to Sally and Peter (who seems especially disappointed with how she's turned out), who are both present, that she is more than she appears, that she's not satisfied with her somewhat boring life with Richard).

Clarissa, in the end, does not kill herself, though she doesn't seem to see it as a very bad idea, as she understands the potential reasons that Septimus has done it and says that she's happy for him. It's perhaps the presence of Peter and Sally, her friends from her Bourton days, that give her hope to reclaim the feeling of happiness that she had there; to give life another chance. It's this vast difference in the character's final decisions, as well as the completely separate initial motivations, that show that Septimus is a completely independent character whose story helps Clarissa reflect on her own life and not just a physical representation of a darker part of Clarissa's personality.

Howie

On the whole, I really enjoyed The Mezzanine. It was a very unique and fun-to-read book, and it provided a lot of interesting little insights into what was everyday life at that point. Its footnotes were also very enjoyable and a highlight of the book. One of the parts of the book that I loved, though, was one that wasn't clearly prominent: Howie's personality. 

Howie was actually one of the more interesting characters I've read about recently, and that's in large part due to the way that he's presented to the reader. In most books, characters will be more clearly defined; we learn about their names (it's pretty easy to miss the fact that the narrator's name is Howie, as it's mentioned in passing twice over the course of the entire book), interests, and histories either from the author or from other characters, and we can see their personalities from decisions that they make in important moments in the plot. Without any real character-defining decisions in the shoe-lace buying plot of The Mezzanine, and with the strange writing and formatting style of the book, we can't really learn about Howie in a "traditional" way, and thus sort of have to pick up what we can about his personality from random thoughts and and memories that pop up in response to whatever he's doing at the time. We aren't told specific details about his life because Baker is trying to write to represent what Howie would really be thinking, not just for the ease of the reader, and that's what we get; we never learn what he does for a living because he isn't thinking about it, he's just thinking about the actual physical work he has to do there, which seems just like generic office work.

What we can learn from this about Howie is that he's actually kind of a strange person. Observing the things in everyday in detail is actually something that pretty much everyone does without talking about, but Howie does it to a pretty extreme level. He's just constantly thinking about what's around him, wondering how things work, thinking of stories about his past experiences with something, and going into a lot of detail about it. People when they're going about their day are generally at least a little bit tuned out, and just take some things for granted instead of investigating everything as Howie does. I thought the disparity between Howie's outward appearance and his inner life was great; on the surface he's just a normal part of society who's gone through life like he's supposed to and gotten a normal job, but from his thoughts we can see that he's actually oddly disassociative when thinking about society; it's like he's taken a step back from the things that seem routine to most people and sort of looks on them in wonder, thinking about how amazing it is that these things exist and that people take them for granted and always wondering how things work. Things don't seem to come easily to Howie in a way, and he seems to really value having an understanding of how things work and how to work them (this is shown very clearly by how he in large part measures his life through little "advances" like applying deodorant under his shirt). And, of course, he could normally take more things for granted and it just happens that this is a day where he looks really closely at the world, but it seems, from his character and from the chart of thoughts at the end (which was an amazing tool to characterize someone), that this is sort of what Howie is like every day; constantly dissecting things and thinking about life, that each event in his life is its own Mezzanine.