Peter Walsh's defining characteristic is ambivalence: he is middle-aged and regrets the wasted

years of his life, yet he still feels he is still young and has a bright future ahead of him. He is
unable of committing to a persona or even a romantic relationship since he lacks self-confidence.
He is unable to make up his mind about what he is feeling and frequently tries to convince
himself to feel or not feel certain things. His obsession with Clarissa suggests that he is still
attracted to her and may even be looking for a new relationship if he spends the day trying to
convince himself that he no longer cares for her. In spite of his best efforts to contain his fury
against Clarissa and his declarations of his newfound adoration, he breaks down in tears and
cries. Peter provides a contrast to Richard, who is steady, kind, and forthright. Peter, in contrast
to Richard's calm demeanour, is like a storm, roaring and crashing, even to his own ears.

The reader is informed that Peter Walsh is now in India, and that he would be arriving in
England soon after Clarissa Dalloway's recollections introduce him. The narrator reveals that
Peter Walsh is not only in love with the wife of a serving Indian Army officer, but that he is also
descended from a family of "respectable" Anglo-Indians, who have been in command of "the
affairs of the continent" for three generations. As a result of this biographical fact, Peter Walsh is
depicted as a colonial agent, although an improbable one, despite his age.

His unhealed wounds and continuous insecurity cause him to be very judgmental of the other
characters in his life. The Dalloways, in particular. He despises Clarissa's bourgeois upbringing,
while he believes Richard is to fault for her development into the lady she has become. Clarissa
is able to deduce even his most subtle comments, such as when he makes a passing remark on
her green clothing, and his judgements have a significant impact on her own appraisals of her life
and choices. Despite his scathing criticisms of other people. Peter is unable to see his own flaws
or limitations. Clarissa would have been smothered by his self-obsession and neediness, which is
one of the reasons she turned down his marriage proposal when she was a young lady. Peter
accepts the exact English society that he despises, taking pleasure in the illusory feeling of order
that it provides, something that he himself lacks in his life. Despite Peter's ambivalence and
proclivity for analysis, he nonetheless has a strong emotional response to life, while Clarissa
comes to grips with the fact that she is going to die. When Peter thinks about dying, he feels
agitated. A young lady leads him around the streets of London, where he hopes to drown out his
thoughts of death with a fantasyland of life and excitement. His critical temperament may cause
him to become estranged from others. Despite this, he places a high value on his life.

So it is precisely this aspect of his personality that truly defines him as a failure; it is this childish
restlessness and possessiveness that prevents him from either seeing anything through to
completion or from letting go of anything once that thing (or person) has proven itself
unsatisfactory or in any other way inadequate, if not downright boring. He is similarly bound to
them by his birth into an Anglo-Indian family, by his administrative position in India, by his
education, by his choice of books and wheelbarrows, by his choice of women, and by his choice
of books and wheelbarrows. He fails in this regard because, even if he may consider his
environment to be vacuous and deserving of vituperative criticism, his personal commitment to
and dependency on it is so strong that he is unable of seeing beyond it.