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

house, it is difficult to tell where concrete description stops and metaphor begins:
“Now, day after day, light turned, like a flower reflected in water, its sharp image on
the wall opposite. Only the shadows of the trees, flourishing in the wind, made
obeisance on the wall, and for a moment darkened the pool in which light reflected
itself; or birds, flying, made a soft spot flutter across the bedroom floor” (229). The
paragraph initially invokes both a specific time (now) and an iterative (day after day),
thus blending specific event with a repetition of similar events. The second sentence
initially offers a narration of exclusivity—no other shadowing events occur. It then, to
use Brian Richardson’s term for when “a narrator denies significant aspects of his or
her narrative that had earlier been present as given,” denarrates this exclusivity to
offer another possibility (Richardson, Unnatural Voices 87). It is also difficult to tell
whether these possibilities are mutually exclusive—or whether the trees or birds
might cast shadows.
There is an additional possibility: that none of the above passage is a narration
of specific events, repeated or otherwise: instead, the play of shadow and light is a
metaphor plucked not from the narrator’s knowledge of events in the story-world, but
from the narrator’s imagination. The mystic on the beach presents a similar set of
problems: events of uncertain frequency, involving an uncertain (and even altered)
number of agents, which might even be the purely hypothetical concoctions of a
narrator seeking to narrate the unnarratable. This same phenomenon permeates much
of “Time Passes” and is deeply connected to the features which have resulted in many
critics labeling the section “lyric” or “poetic.” It puts into question the narrator’s
reliability—and even the terms on which we might establish that reliability.
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