When the returned Great War soldier Septimus Smith and his wife Rezia appear on Portland Place, we encounter one of the passages in Mrs. Dalloway (1925) that both thematizes strangeness and is itself strange:

The concluding comment, “how strange,” here indicates alienation and defamilarization— although not entirely the alienation and defamiliarization of Septimus and Rezia Smith. This description places especially Septimus at a “strange” series of narratorial removes from Portland Place, the initial location of his uncanny exploration—an exploration not only of London's West End but of dimensions of figurative language. In this paragraph of description, point of view shifts from a gestured-at observer to a stand-in for Septimus; from a locus in Portland Place to the interior of a weirdly extended simile: “as if Portland were a room” that is uninhabited, although Portland Place is a public square full of people; as if a caretaker, not in evidence in Portland Place itself, were showing the visitor through vacated rooms, and so on.

The strangeness of this passage makes it unclear whether the concluding “how strange” ought to be applied to Portland Place, and by extension all of postwar London with its myriad voices and points of view; or whether the strangeness is in the eye of the beholder. Literally, that beholder is the generic figure “a clerk,” not specifically Septimus.