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

integral to the musical and dramatic whole. It both contrasts and connects—not only
or necessarily by providing a lighter form of entertainment, but by differing in form.
The interlude is, however, not a complete unit unto itself: while a single
instrumental movement might be played separately from the larger piece of music of
which it is a part and completes, in a sense, its own musical story, the interlude assists
in the completion of the larger story. Julia Briggs emphasizes the prominence of the
interlude in music to connect “Time Passes,” as well as its very narrative engagement
with changes both personal and public wrought by the passage of the years, and
especially by World War I, to the most abstract of art forms: “In ‘Time Passes’, the
concept of cultural break is reworked as a quasi-musical, or even cinematic interlude”
(Briggs 131). It is precisely this aspect of “Time Passes” that I wish to emphasize: its
power to combine the abstract with the concrete, the timeless with the historical, the
narrative with the poetic, the integral with the separate. “Time Passes” is both the
binding force that holds To the Lighthouse together as a single narrative and a break
from its personal narrative of momentary saturation. It both confirms and rejects
modernist and traditional narrative alike, opening up a new space for the middle while
at the same time deepening the middle’s dependence on the beginning and the end. It
is an interlude: the brief play that by its difference of form and content both separates
and connects.
“Time Passes” consists of ten sections, covering a period of ten years, from
the fall of darkness on the day of “The Window” to the moment Lily Briscoe wakes
up the morning after a September evening return to the Ramsays’ Scottish summer
home. The first section is narratively continuous with “The Window,” as it follows an
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