James Joyce is the pioneer of modernist fiction. His works gained popularity during the 20th century as it contained the elements and style of the modern era.

The points are as follows –

• Experimentation with structure and style – James Joyce rejected the traditional writing style adapting to the recent interest in non linear story telling and fragmented narratives during those times.
• Exploring the Stream of Consciousness – Stream of Consciousness reffers to the term where the readers can learn about the character’s inner thoughts and feelings. This was a new trend going on during the 20th century into which most of the modern writers tried to adapt. James Joyce’s works like ‘Ulysses’ and ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’  explore this psychological concept.
• Focus on individual’s inner experience – As known, Modern fiction involves personal experiences of the characters. This writing style allows the readers to know about the characters inner life and experience and James Joyce leaves no exceptions to that. We see in depth analysis of the character mostly in his works.

His works adhere to the features of writing style and structure of the Modern era hence making it a modernist fiction.

The word ‘Thanatos’ means a figure representing it’s own destruction or death. Sigmund Freud used this term to define an instict or a fundamental force in an organism’s mind  to take it’s own life out of aggression or depression, in other words called the ‘death drive’.

Here in the novel ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ by Virginia Woolf  we see some characters dealing with this psychological aspect.

In the character portrayal of Clarissa Dalloway. Clarissa physically doesn’t cause any harm to herself but is struggling with her thoughts in her mind. She struggles to fit in the society and her thoughts often revolve around decline, aging and death. The passing of time is what that scares her.

Clarissa’s self doubt and her feelings of emptiness and disconnection with world might be seen as a subconscious desire to escape the burdens of  life.

An excellent example we’ve got in the novel is the Character of Septimus Warren Smith. A character suffering from Shell Shock and trauma. He faces problems accepting the present because of the trauma he’s been through during the World War 2 and the loss of his best friend. 

Septimus sees death as an escape from the struggles of real world and a source of salvation. He is fixated on death that makes him intense long for annihilation. He wants to escape and be free from the trauma and experiences of his past.

Obsessed being an escapist , he takes his own life leading to his own destruction reflecting  Sigmund Freud’s theory of Thanatos.

Therefore, this explains how we can perceive “Mrs.Dalloway” from the perspective of Sigmund Freud’s theory of Thanatos.