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

series of events within time. That is, regardless of the merits of the narrator and its
sentiments, and the relative importance of temporal flow and narrative voice to the
concept of lyricism, “Time Passes” is notable for the presence of a great deal of nonnarrative
discourse. Thus, Ralph Freedman calls the entire section an “extended prose
poem” (234). Rather than a narrative in which events occur within the linear order of
time, “Time Passes” turns the passage of time itself into a lyrical moment:
“Anticipating The Waves, it depicts the moment through images, transforming it
finally into a larger image of time itself. Freed from dependence on human beings, it
renders, in a more abstract form, the interrelation between the inner and outer worlds
of protagonists on the one hand and a symbolic world on the other” (Freedman, Ralph
233). In this sense, “Time Passes” does not offer a traditional narrative counterpoint
to modernist lyrical narrative, but radically encases some elements of traditional
narrative—the passage of time, the presence of events—within a radical lyricism.
That is, within “Time Passes,” non-narrative discourse is given a prominent, even
dominant, position, while the restoration of some elements of traditional narrative are
compensated by the removal of others. The absence in many places of bourgeois or
even human protagonists removes “Time Passes” even further from the realm of
traditional or even modernist narrative. Bremond defines narrative as follows: “All
narrative consists of a discourse which integrates a sequence of events of human
interest into the unity of a single plot” (390). In To the Lighthouse, the middle
provides the sequence of events, while the beginning and the end provide the human
interest. While beginning, middle, and end all contain some of each element of
Bremondian narrative, they also each minimize a key element. Further, only
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