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

middle by making itself markedly different from the beginning and the end. It also,
however, challenges the weakness of that definition by insisting that the middle is not
simply between the beginning and the end, but that it bridges the narrative gap
between beginning and end. Despite the stark division provided by the part’s title,
“Time Passes” transitions gradually from beginning to end: without that title, we
would perhaps find the beginning of the middle of To the Lighthouse in section two
or three of “Time Passes.” “Time Passes,” as middle, is both distinct from and melded
to the beginning and end. It is marked by its difference from the narrative of
beginning and end, but it cannot separate itself completely from the narrative
conventions already established. Its locational fixity both marks its similarity from the
beginning and the end (it shares a location) and its difference (it maintains this
location even when all other narrative elements have left).
Fundamentally, though, the middle both separates and holds together the
narrative. It provides a gap between “The Window” and “The Lighthouse” in both
reading time and story time. But it also, as James Naremore notes, closes a ten-year
gap by imagining the gap as a single night: “the section begins with the characters
coming in from outside and preparing for bed, and ends with everyone reluctantly
waking up to a new day” (Naremore 116). Paradoxically, by including multiple
temporal frameworks, Woolf is able to give a novel which takes place over a ten-year
period a temporal as well as spatial Aristotelian dramatic unity. This unity is
achieved, however, only through the great lyrical force of the middle. It is the tenyear
gap narrated by “Time Passes” that holds the beginning and the end together
conceptually as a narrative: only the passage of time allows us to read “The
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