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

eginning, middle, and end together form the unity of a single plot. “Time Passes” is
both narrative and poetic because it contains parts of a traditional narrative, so that,
combined with the parts contained in the beginning and end, a full narrative is formed
not only in sequence but in terms of the elements that would be present throughout a
traditional narrative.
The close reading of “Time Passes” that follows will flesh out the ways the
middle of To the Lighthouse offers a different set of challenges to traditional narrative
than the rest of the novel. “Time Passes” challenges To the Lighthouse’s own
modernist conventions while using aspects of those conventions to challenge realist
conventions. The passage of time returns the novel to the realm of eventful narrative,
but the acceleration and jumbling of the passage of time threatens to remove the novel
from the realm of narrative entirely by, to paraphrase Woolf, giving us nothing to
cling to. Meanwhile, as the narrator grasps for lower-class and nonhuman focalizers
through which to narrate the world, it seems to extend itself beyond the limited point
of view of the bourgeois novel, whether modernist or realist. Simultaneously, though,
the narrator reveals its limitations, as it anthropomorphizes the natural world and
maintains a bourgeois view of its working-class characters. 14 “Time Passes” asks
what is left out by traditional and modernist narrative forms, but its ability to get
beyond these forms and to include what has been left out is limited.
14 As Tratner argues, Woolf’s presentation of Mrs. McNab and other working-class women is mixed:
“they are not seen as replacing ‘us,’” but there is “a genuine sense of having gained something
from them, of having followed their lead in moving toward something new” (Tratner 65). We can
see the narrator enact this ambivalence with the shift from external focalization to a brief internal
focalization: a narrator that is exploring these characters rather than being guided by their thoughts.
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