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

y the narrator, allow a world unpopulated by the Ramsays and their ilk to be
narrated, while the bracketed narrator further allows the world outside the summer
home and its immediate environs to be narrated as well. Shifts in voice and in story
content are thus inextricably paired. To the Lighthouse thus reveals many of the
narrative limitations of the bourgeois modernist voice as represented in “The
Window” and “The Lighthouse.”
Most of these challenges to the narrative voice of the first and third sections of
To the Lighthouse, however, can be understood within Genette’s basic model of
narrative voice, in which the novelist must choose “between two narrative postures
[…]: to have the story told by one of its ‘characters,’ or to have it told by a narrator
outside of the story” (Genette, Narrative Discourse 244). Genette adds in a note that
“in fiction nothing prevents us from entrusting that role to an animal […] or indeed to
an ‘inanimate’ object” (Narrative Discourse 244n). The narrator of “Time Passes”
remains clearly outside the story, while its focalizers shift between the animate and
the inanimate. This is why Leaska is able to assign, at least provisionally, every word
in To the Lighthouse to a particular voice, “omniscient” or otherwise, within Woolf’s
“multiple-point-of-view method” (Leaska, Novels 142). Although “Time Passes”
does, through the narrator’s uncertainty and its recourse to a largely Romantic poetic
discourse in the absence of human agency, challenge that narrator’s claim to
omniscience, the narrator remains solidly heterodiegetic.
However, though it remains a relatively simple task to define the voice of
“Time Passes” within Genette’s scheme, it is more difficult to define this voice’s
relationship to the story-world. When the narrator describes, for example, the emptied
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