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

conventions of modernist narrative by examining what is left out of that narrative
form. Nevertheless, in seeking out focalizers and attempting to distill the passage of
time into metonymic or imagined moments, narrator also works to maintain the
novel’s dominant mode.
Meanwhile, the very act of getting from the dinner of “The Window” to the
breakfast of “The Lighthouse” suggests a return to traditional narrative. As I have
already suggested, however, in the context of the entire novel, this rapid resumption
of “getting on” in the middle of the novel is an alternative to, rather than an
affirmation of, the traditional flow of time in the novel as described by Genette: the
regular alternation of summary and scene. Comparing To the Lighthouse to Forster’s
claim that the novelist cannot completely abolish time, even if the philosopher might,
Ann Banfield argues that the very title of “Time Passes” “affirms the realist position”
(475). However, the mere passage of time is not adequate to affirm the realist
position, except in the broadest sense. That is, as a work of modernist fiction, To the
Lighthouse generally affirms a stable ontology for its diegetic world, even as
epistemological problems, such as our perception of the flow of time, shape the
novel’s poetics. Time exists, then, but we do not fully understand it, and the ways we
might perceive it—and its effect on the rhythms of narrative—may vary greatly.
There are further problems with Banfield’s assertion that the title of “Time Passes”
affirms the realist position. “Time Passes” vacates the human subject of the
traditional narrative episode. We can go even further—the title “Time Passes”
extracts everything but the flow of time from the traditional elements of narrative. As
I shall discuss later in more detail, even this flow of time is given a non-traditional
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