Ironical and Pitiful

I'm sure we all remember the scene where Jake is digging worms for fishing while Bill watches out the window on page 118, and Bill, trying to be as comical as possible, ends up singing about irony and pity. The scene starts with Bill being called a lazy bum by Jake for not helping to dig, at which point Bill pops into bed, and says that he never gets up. As soon as Jake mentions food, Bill hops up and jokes that he's getting breakfast, and Jake is working for the common good, encouraging him to have irony and pity. As he goes downstairs, Bill even sings about being ironical and pitiful. As they reach breakfast, Bill continues to pressure Jake to show irony and pity to the waitress endlessly.

All this is meant to be another one of Bill's extensive on-the-spot comedy sketches, and it certainly made me laugh. However, it seems that "ironical and pitiful" are the standards Bill lives up to. Irony exudes from his character in all of his comedic episodes. He uses it as his main tool, as do most amateur comics. More evident in this scene is they way he is utterly pitiful. Right from the start, as Bill makes a jovial attempt to stay in bed, his jokes can be described as little more than pitiful. At no point in this entire scene could I imagine Jake laughing without shaking his head in embarrassment or pity for Bill's desperate attempts at humor. They way Bill changes from pulling the covers up above his head to racing down for food at the drop of a hat is one of the purest examples of humor through portraying yourself as pitifully as possible that I have ever seen, and if that's not enough, he risks an excessive amount of strange looks from bystanders as he sings pitifully on the way to breakfast.

Most clearly demonstrating Bill's pitiful attitude towards comedy is when he practically begs Jake to joke with him. Jake only put in a sensible amount of effort: enough to prompt Bill's next response. Meanwhile, Bill was becoming the very definition of pitiful with his begging and pressuring of Jake. This in itself is pitiful enough, but then Bill presents himself as an irony expert; almost nothing is more pitiful than an expert insisting and pleading that someone else try to match his expertise.

Considering that Bill was as pitiful as he could have been, he made a seemingly out of place connection between himself and Cohn when Jake offered Robert Cohn as something pitiful, and Bill says that wasn't a bad attempt. Bill and Cohn are pitiful characters, but Bill failed to differentiate between his and Cohn's brand of pity. Bill was plainly being pitiful on purpose; everything pitiful thing he did in this scene was purposeful. Cohn, on the other hand, was naturally pitiful. He didn't have to try to look the part. The important difference is humor. Cohn is serious. He's too serious to be likable to most readers, but Bill is funny. As stupid as he looks, Bill makes people laugh, and that makes his character likable. This is a further comment on Cohn. His problem isn't that he is pitiful, rather that he can't use that pity to his advantage.

Septimus's world and the real world.

Septimus Warren Smith, because of his mental health, interprets things differently than any other character in the novel Mrs. Dalloway, sometimes even seeing or hearing things that no one else does. His entire world is distorted and seems crazy, but Wolf always manages to relate his reality back to actual reality through his wife Lucrezia. Whenever we see Septimus from Rezia's perspective, she is always trying to nudge him back into the real world, and whenever we see the world through Septimus's eyes, the next perspective is almost always Lucrezia's.

This is a big help to understanding how Septimus's mind is distorting reality, because it allows us to see the parallels between his and the outside world without Wolf having to break from her usual style of writing through the perspectives of her characters. When we first meet them, Spetimus was endlessly slipping back into his own convoluted mind, which, from the reader's perspective, was a mess of illogical connections that eventually lead into totally backwards philosophy. If it weren't for Rezia being a link back into the real world after every paragraph of this nonsense, we would become lost in this strange world of Septimus without understanding how it relates to anything. Rezia brings us back, allowing us to make connections between Septimus and his surrounding, so that we can better understand how he warps reality, and that helps us understand his character, especially once we learn Septimus's backstory, at which point it is possible to look at the way in which he sees the world with a new understanding and sympathy.