ABSTRACT Title of Document: BRITISH MODERNIST ... - DRUM

eginning. That is, a modernist middle may not follow in an ineluctable narrative
logic from the initial proposition of the beginning, but instead may stand beside it, a
disjunction or disruption of the beginning. From the reader’s perspective, then, the
modernist middle may multiply or revise our sense of the beginning intention,
reshaping the text in its own image. Therefore, we are perhaps as likely to find a
modernist text’s intention—the key principle which structures the narrative, its
meaning, and its dominant poetic concerns—in the middle of the text as at the
beginning or the end.
With Tristram Shandy rather than modernism as his model of non-traditional
narrative, Miller, too, disputes Aristotelian necessity, and along with it any clear
means with which to choose beginnings and endings: “Is there really ever a beginning
of a play that does not itself follow anything by causal necessity? Or is there is [sic]
an ending that nothing follows? Are all the middle elements ever connected by a clear
causal necessity to what comes before and after?” (Miller, Reading Narrative 9).
Whereas Kermode asserts the reality of the middle, Miller asserts the importance of
the middle to narrative. In stark contrast to Aristotle, Kermode, and Said alike, Miller
even asserts the middle’s independence from the beginning and ending. However,
much like Kermode’s concept of “the middest,” Miller’s concept of middles is really
an attack on the notion of a complete, meaningful, natural Aristotelian narrative,
rather than an examination of the middle as a distinct component of narrative.
Miller’s exploration of middles, then, is really a discussion of causality. As such,
Miller’s definition of the middle is modeled closely on Aristotle’s, simply removing
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