In the era where the novel takes place, World War One has just ended. Society is just learning how to deal with new methods of science and dealing with mental health. Freud was a new psychologist that had started to think of mental health as able to be treated, like a physical malady. Previously, it was thought that anything other than perfect mental health was the work of the devil, or evil spirits. The new highly technological weaponry used in the war had unprecedented consequences in terms of it's effects on battle. Machine guns, tanks, airplanes, submarines, long-range weapons, flamethrowers, grenades, etc., were products of the Industrial Revolution and had never been used in combat before. This led to a great many deaths, over 37 million people on both sides died, soldiers and citizens alike. The new machines set a new precedent for wartime, even modern wars use the same weapons. If these soldiers survived the battlefront, then there is little doubt that their experience in combat changed their lives. 

Take Septimus Warren Smith. This is a man who has recently been to war for England during WWI. Though his character isn't the main character, we see a lot of his perspective on what we find out to be his last day. The insight that we have into his mind reminds me a lot of Dalí's painting. The way that Septimus was seeing hallucinations, hearing things that weren't there is reminiscent of the war-torn skull with smaller skulls inside. To me, the painting represents PTSD (which was known as shellshock at the time. Seeing mortality everywhere was a common problem after the war. The pessimism and depression because of PTSD couldn't be treated as no one really took it seriously. Dr. Holmes, a doctor that Septimus and his wife went to go see, just told Septimus that he was "in a funk" (Woolf 92). He said that he needed rest and was simply having a bad day rather than having serious mental health problems, saying that in the end there was nothing the matter (Woolf 95). No doctors knew what treatment to prescribe and it didn't help that some of them just didn't take Septimus seriously. Dalí's painting is a visual that to me describes the mind of someone re-living their trauma over and over. At the time, there was nothing that anyone could do to move soldiers towards healing. Sometimes the only way for the soldiers to cope with their trauma was to commit suicide, like Septimus did.