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

(“narrated monologue”) as “a choice medium for revealing a fictional mind
suspended in an instant present, between a remembered past and an anticipated
future” (Cohn, Transparent 126). What Cohn calls “narrated memories” abound in
“The Window,” as Mrs. Ramsay, Lily Briscoe, and other characters recall past events
(Cohn, Transparent 128). Meanwhile, the novel also repeats scenes or snatches of
time from multiple perspectives, most famously the juxtaposed final scenes of Lily
Briscoe completing her painting and the Ramsays reaching the lighthouse. “Time
Passes” has no focalizers to launch such anachronies, with the exceptions of Mrs.
McNab and Mrs. Bast, whose memories tend to be general (“They lived well in those
days.”) or non-immersive (“The young gentleman was dead.”), at least for the reader,
who is told that Mrs. McNab is “wantoning in her memories,” but is not given
unfettered access to these unfettered memories (140). The narrator uses Mrs. McNab
as a focalizer, following her eyes to “the old gentlemen, then entering narrated
monologue: “He never noticed her. Some said he was dead; some said she was dead.
Which was it? Mrs. Bast didn’t know for certain either. The young gentleman was
dead. That was sure. She had read his name in the papers” (140). While this is clearly
free indirect discourse, it is ambiguous whether this is narrated internal monologue, or
whether it is spoken dialogue. Here we see one of the limitations of “Time Passes” as
an antidote to the socially-limited view of the rest of the novel: even when it accesses
the minds of working-class people, those minds do not open completely and
unambiguously.
Yet it has been easy for critics to overstate the limitations here, and to ignore
the narrator’s growing sympathy for Mrs. McNab, and the move toward internal
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