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

Lighthouse” as the flawed realization of the human-lifetime-scaled expectations of
“The Window.” Similarly, the greater prominence given to the war and to death in
“Time Passes”—the attention to catastrophic events—gives broader narrative license
to the dwelling on bourgeois consciousness of the beginning and the end. Because
“Time Passes” looks upon such consciousness as both insignificant in the face of the
nonhuman passage of time, and sees such consciousness as the only available model
for narrative, the middle of To the Lighthouse serves as a guide for reading the minds
of Lily Briscoe and the Ramsays within a specific historical and political context.
“Time Passes” attempts, but ultimately fails, to narrate the war and the nonhuman
passage of time, and it has limited success in providing space for working-class
consciousness within modernist narrative.
“Time Passes” does, however, put its beginning and end, in which the
anxieties of the bourgeois play out over seemingly inconsequential events, within the
context of what they do not narrate. It suggests, ultimately, that what holds the
beginning and the end together is the middle, and what holds the narrated together is
what it does not narrate. “Time Passes” is a middle of what is passed over—a fleeting
suggestion of what is left between the beginning and the end, what is obscured by the
finitude of narrative. In doing so, it suggests that the finite acquires both shape and
meaning from the infinite, that the seemingly narrow focus of the modernist mode of
“The Window” and “The Lighthouse” depends upon its broader historical and
existential context. The moment of being, the slice of life, however small, exists only
in the broader flow of time. It is this broader flow of time, then, that makes of these
moments narrative. “Time Passes,” therefore, not only falls between To the
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