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

lyric importance once again serves as a foreshadowing of actual narrative events in
brackets, but also as a way to bind the narrative of the house through the years to the
cyclical seasonal narrative that is superimposed upon this linear narrative.
Meanwhile, the narrative conceit of a single night remains—and all of this maintains
a connection to specific narrative events (whether associated with Mrs. McNab, who
briefly appears “looking like a tropical fish” in section six, with nonhuman events
such as the unfolding of the shawl, or with the bracketed events concerning the
characters introduced in “The Window”) and to the broad historical events of World
War I.
I will say more about the general effects of the superimposition of different
levels of narrative time later in this chapter. At this point, it is worth noting the
specific re-calibration in the relationship between the seasonal narrative and the
human-scale narratives brought on by World War I. If Prue Ramsay’s death inverts
the expected relationship, World War I eventually destroys it. In the summer night,
“the thud of something falling” is immediately juxtaposed to a battle scene: “[A shell
exploded. Twenty or thirty young men were blown up in France, among them
Andrew Ramsay, whose death, mercifully, was instantaneous.]” (133). Once again,
the brackets mix objective reportage with the viewpoint (“mercifully”) of the
community, though here the community is no longer marked off from the objective
narrator by the reporting clause “they said.” This is the only mention of World War I
in “Time Passes” until the primary narrator’s assertion in the final section that “peace
had come” (142). Instead of directly narrating the destruction created by the war, the
narrator returns to “those who had gone down to pace the beach” (133). This time,
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