The end of Mrs. Dalloway

In my mind, the ending of Mrs. Dalloway  was the better for its lack of suicide. All deep character-defining characteristics aside, a suicide there would just be too expected. "Ennui-filled housewife commits suicide" is so New Yorker; it's almost a cliché, honestly. You can't build a great novel around such a specific and tired premise. The ending as it stands actually makes us think. The conclusion we arrived at in class-- that is, that the ending is in many ways a celebration of life-- makes a lot of sense to me, and I'm more than a little enamored of Clarissa's Joie de vivre. In class, a couple of people intimated that perhaps Clarissa was supposed to be a superficial character, and that her "deep" thoughts were merely Woolf's way of showing that even the most shallow people think about death and so forth. Nonsense, in my opinion; we're given a number of flashbacks to her having almost tragically "modern" and "deep" conversations with Peter and so forth. She might appear superficial superficially, but she's a smart girl, and this makes the fact that she ends up with such a healthy and positive outlook really nice and quite unexpected.