  Worst restaurant ever? Well, thatd be a toss up between Home Town Buffet and Souplantation. So where did the lgbt group decided to go tonight before the movie? The S-word. Should I go? Do I dare?
I should note that Ive also been invited to attend a dinner at Rockin Baja Lobster. Never been there, but it gots to be better than cafeteria-style slop reminiscent of my imagined time in the service. Theyre on their way there (wow! All forms of there in one concise sentence! ), so Id better go. Im a bit ravenous after spending a four hour study and prep session with the 504 ladies.
The big presentation is tomorrow. Heres my part to be taught to the class: Septimus Smith Septimus is branded by his doctors as being mad. Yet Froula raises the question  is he? In this article, she explores that question as well as the issue of his character within the framework of the novel as a post-war elegy. To the issue of madness, she sites Foucault. His theory is that civilisation disciplines madness to suppress its truths while art recaptures truths branded madness to confront the world with the necessity of change (Froula 15).
So, Septimuss character forces us to reexamine what is truth and what is madness in a spiritually bankrupt post-war Europe. She describes Septimus as being a scapegoat to the new reality of Europe and for the immense weight of loss hanging over civilisation. He has witnessed first-hand the aggression inherent in humanity and its threat against the future of the world. He is tortured by the images he carries with him in his mind and besieged by guilt for having survived but left unable to feel. His reality is shattered  replaced by the notion that the world is without meaning. Like Clarissa, he questions the existence of God in a world so fraught with violent aggression and despair.
I agree with Froulas analysis; that Septimus is at once a sort of prophet who claims to see a new truth that reorders religious ideologies. And at the same time, not many would question whether hes a madman (whatever judgment we want to put on that). The novel casts new light on post-war reality and causes us to rethink the fundamental underpinnings our civilisation is predicated on. How could this war have happened? Whats left? And more importantly, how do we move on from here?
Froula calls him an elegiac consciousness (Froula 16). His mind struggles to carry the grief and move on from it by framing his experience in a message to the world. The message he brings back with him also contains truths about the murderous aggression of war and its threat to civilisations endurance. Yet society is constructed so as not to hear this. His physicians embody the cultures refusal to examine the larger questions brought out by the war. Like many Britons, theyve turned the madness of the war onto the soldiers, making it their pathology thats the problem that needs to be dealt with.
I hadnt thought about this before reading the article, and I think its a great point she makes. Rather than to bear the burden placed on him by the doctors, he fights to communicate his message through prophetic speech and finally by his suicide. Although he tries to convey his thoughts, his efforts are ultimately a failure. Instead, he re-enacts his civilisations appalling crime by turning the violence on himself. He offers his life as a gift to the world that, according to Froula, he fully expects to be read. He is posing as a Christ figure, sacrificing his own life for the sake of others.
In Septimus mind, The whole world was clamouring: Kill yourself, kill yourself, for our sakes (MD 92). Froula describes his death as the moment when two realities converge; that of the suicide society demands and, as Clarissa somehow divines, an attempt to communicate (MD184). He is pushed, yet he also jumps (Froula 19). His suicide is seen as pathology by the doctors, yet Clarissa reads it as Septimus intends. His action passes the message on to her. It sparks in her a spontaneous private elegy for him.
She muses that he preserved something by saying no to the Conversion imposed on him by the doctors who branded him insane; The Conversion to Christianity as salvation and to the insistence that he has lost his mind. To her, he preserved something that matters, untouched by the hands of a society that wished to confine him. This elegy created within Clarissa leads her to reflect on her own blighted truth; Sallys kiss. His suicide acts as a substitution for her own losses, a cathartic mourning, allowing her to safely revisit the compromises she too has made in bowing to societys constraints and failures. The author goes on to say that the point of the elegy is not so much for Clarissa to fully grasp the meaning of Septimus death but for us, the readers, to reconsider the state of a post-war civilisation. We are left to wonder; Is it enough?
(Maybe only makes sense to those who have #1: read the critical article (30 pages! ) were responding to, and #2: have read Mrs. Dalloway. Bye yall. 
