In The Ashes of a Cigarette

Throughout reading Mrs. Dalloway I found the mention of a cigarette quite often. It appears when Clarissa is thinking about life and the decisions she has made. When analyzing this I could not help but think of the metaphor that can be so strongly linked to it. It is my belief that most of our lives are like a cigarette, you find whatever it is that sparks the flame, and then we must cherish it until the embers run out. We watch pieces of our lives fall away in the ashes, which Clarissa has seen with Sally and Peter. Also it is towards the end of the novel where we are going to see the cigarette of Septimus’s life burn out completely.