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

same: we are in the same place, with some of the same characters, and it can be
narrated in the same fashion. A single night, this transition suggests, may seem the
same as ten years; nothing is different, and everything is different.
On multiple levels, “Time Passes” includes what is excluded in “The
Window” and “The Lighthouse.” It gives attention, and then voice, to working class
characters, thus challenging the parameters of the bourgeois novel of manners and
ideas. It gives attention, and even focalization, to the nonhuman, thus challenging the
human basis of narrative. It gives space for its narrator to expound separately from
the mind of any character, challenging the modernist allegiance to narrative
objectivity and the stream-of-consciousness devotion to the narrative rendering of
subjectivity. An anonymous “mystic” or “visionary” on the beach quickly becomes
plural, “asking themselves ‘What am I,’ What is this?’”, challenging not only the
humanist unity of character, but also the objectivity of the narrative event and the
reliability of a seemingly omniscient narrator (131). Finally, within short bracketed
passages, events are narrated—often major, often traumatic, often far away from the
Ramsays’ summer home—in a reporterly tone, challenging the spatial, dramatic, and
narratorial unity of the text.
“Time Passes” also shows how closely matters of voice are related to story as
well as discourse . The absence of bourgeois guests in the house necessitates
strategies of voice other than the primary mode of “The Window” and “The
Lighthouse”: indirect discourse rendering bourgeois thought. Conversely, focalization
through Mrs. Bast and the “certain airs,” as well as the various modes of
heterodiegetic discourse (that is, originating from outside the story-world) taken on
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