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

spring from the narrative problem of representation of the night, when the tools of
vision and consciousness no longer provide access to the scene. While the challenges
“Time Passes” takes upon itself and, in turn, creates for the reader, are both formal
and representational in nature, it announces the object to be represented as the
foundational principle of its existence. In this sense, “Time Passes” remains true to
the modernist epistemological dominant: the problem is how a narrator gains access
to a darkened (though ontologically stable) world, and how knowledge of that world
may be transferred to the reader.
This act of representation becomes difficult in the second section, when all of
the story’s characters are asleep. Although there is not yet a rapid acceleration in the
passage of time, the narrative mode established in “The Window” is already greatly
strained. A narrative which has concerned itself primarily with representing conscious
minds finds difficulty to maintain the narrative mode itself. Instead, the second
section is a meditation on the darkness: “Nothing, it seemed, could survive the flood,
the profusion of darkness which, creeping in at keyholes and crevices, stole round
window blinds, came into bedrooms, swallowed up here a jug and basin, there a bowl
of red and yellow dahlias, there the sharp edges and firm bulk of a chest of drawers”
(125-26). Although the narrator seems to be narrating specific events, the narrator
initially must resort to the Biblical metaphor of the flood to provide a narrative
framework—and she does so with little certainty. Indeed, the events that are narrated
here are quite vague, without a clear temporal ordering or even a sense of what this
“profusion of darkness” might be as an agent. In the absence of human agents, the
narrator takes an interest in inanimate objects. The very desire to narrate the darkness
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