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

who creates a mind for inanimate objects. It is through the very will to narrate in
human terms the inanimate that “Time Passes” substitutes the lyric mode for the
narrative mode. Instead of an attempt to narrate the night objectively, the narrator
insists on a subjective mode of narration. In the absence of human characters in the
story to serve as subjects for an internally focalized stream of , the narrator provides
subjective ideas and impressions of her own, though she still attempts to efface
herself with impersonal pronouns. Section two is ultimately the narrator’s
impressions of the night—but, reluctant to openly state her impressions, the narrator
devises the narrative framework of the certain airs. But this framework ultimately
reveals the lyric mode behind the apparent narrative: the narrative of the airs exists
primarily not as a series of objective events in the story-world (even the idea of such
airs as objects is generated by the narrator’s will to narrate) but instead as a figurative
construct created by a subjective observer (the narrator) to understand a basically
non-narrative occurrence. In showing a narrator so determined to create subjects and
events to narrate, Woolf reveals the arbitrariness of all narrative, as the narrator
portions up the nightfall into a set of discrete objects and events which often have no
clear existence outside of the narrator’s ability to constitute them. Without human
subjects to provide thoughts and interpretations of the world, the narrator reveals her
own subjectivity and, in doing so, begins to collapse narrative itself as agents and
events occurring through time give way to meditation, figuration, and speculation on
the vaguely temporal object of nightfall.
To counter the narrator’s increasingly subjective and lyrical mode, the second
section of “Time Passes” also introduces a more rigorously objective form of
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