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

in so far as her presence helps the narrative maintain momentum and contact with the
human world—but that same humanity which the narrative needs also threatens the
nebulous passage of time. “Time Passes” needs to maintain its difference from the
parts that precede and follow it, both because this is what marks it as a middle, and
because this is what allows it to serve its function. In order to link two segments of
modernist narrative, “Time Passes” maintains its difference both from the
conventions of modernism established in “The Window” and from the conventions of
traditional narrative—but it can only stray so far. Its ability both to link, and to
investigate what is left out by both traditional and modernist narrative modes, is
dependent both on its distance from those modes and on its ability to maintain a
connection to those modes. Thus, it must investigate the nonhuman while maintaining
an anchor in the human, just as it destabilizes the temporal element of the chronotope
while maintaining the spatial element.
Section six, the second-longest of the sections, and positioned approximately
in the middle of “Time Passes” both in terms of the number of sections and in terms
of volume of text, contains the heart of the war. Bracketed sections, at their most
plentiful here, announce the marriage and subsequent death in childbirth of Prue
Ramsay, as well as the death in war of Andrew Ramsay. This section seems to fit
Friedman’s reading of a “Time Passes” in which “the power of time, of death, of
linear narrative horrifyingly reasserts itself” (Friedman, “Lyric” 173). However, even
as certain elements of traditional narrative reassert themselves—and it should be
noted that these sorts of events are among the elements of narrative largely
suppressed in “The Window” and “The Lighthouse”—this middle of To the
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