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

summary and scene” (Genette, Narrative Discourse 97). Woolf rejects these
conventions not only on formalist terms (they select nothing) but also realist terms (it
is false, unreal, merely conventional). Woolf, mounts, then, an attack on the
traditional narrative subject as well as the very basis of narrative: the flow of time.
This flow of time can be found not in the presence of a beginning and an end, but in
the “getting on” from one to another. Instead of a connective tissue of alternating
rhythm, Woolf uses the middle to create a different narrative rhythm. “Time Passes”
thus returns the flow of time to modernist narrative, but in a way particularly suited to
Woolf’s concern with individual “moments of being,” reconnecting these moments to
the flow of time even as it disrupts and reconfigures the way that flow of time is
represented and how it shapes our understanding of the narrative.
Woolf would later utilize other techniques for incorporating the flow of time
into her novels which rely less on the prominent middle. The Waves would cope with
the linked problems of middles and the passage of time by alternating frozen
descriptions of the natural world at different stages in the sun’s passage across the sky
with monologues of six characters at various stages of life. Similarly, Woolf’s final
novel, Between the Acts, alternates scenes from a play depicting discrete stages of
history with scenes involving the viewers and producers of the play. The repeated
pattern of alternation creates a certain level of balance from segment to segment of
the text, reducing the prominence of one particular middle. Nevertheless, the
noontime sun and the death of the speakers’ friend, the charismatic young imperialist
Percival, both mark the middle of The Waves and make it the point of crisis in the
plot. The Waves uses the space between its sections to solve the problem of getting
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