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

Mrs. McNab and Mrs. Bast are arguably not part of a web of narrated monologues
because that web is also a web of social relations from which they are excluded.
Finally, the house, where the narrator is located, is their place of work. The absence
of anachrony may be more of a representation of a state of work, and a particular
social web, than it is a limitation to the narrator’s growing sympathy with the
working-class figures. The narrator is limited by a literal place than it is limited by
sympathy or capacity for focalization.
Nevertheless, the absence of clear anachronies makes “Time Passes” linear to
an almost unusual degree. It duration, or speed, “the relationship between a duration
(that of the story, measured in seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, and years) and
a length (that of the text, measured in lines and in pages)” on the other hand, is highly
varied (Genette, Narrative Discourse 87-88). Genette identifies four speeds at which
narrative texts conventionally operate: the descriptive pause, in which the time of the
story stops while narration continues; the scene, in which, usually through dialogue, a
conventional equivalence is achieved between story-time and discourse-space; the
summary, in which story-time moves faster than it does in scene; and the ellipsis, in
which time passes in the gaps in textual discourse, as between chapters in The Golden
Bowl (Genette, Narrative Discourse 93-94). Genette offers a further possibility: “a
sort of scene in slow motion” which covers space between pause and scene
(Narrative Discourse 95). As a whole, “Time Passes” is a sort of summary, since ten
years pass in the space of about twenty pages. Meanwhile, much of “The Lighthouse”
and “The Window” takes place in a sort of slow motion, as characters’ thoughts
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