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

in this man, and continues to narrate the man’s actions without paying attention to his
own. Frobisher spends a page describing the man ordering a drink, then follows him
back out the door. Once again, Frobisher shows an implausible ability to detect his
subject’s inner state, replacing the first person with the third person: “He looked
worried. Rather hungry, too. In the street was a costermonger’s barrow. He seemed to
think he would buy some fruit to eat out here and began to feel for a coin in his
pocket, but some vague anxiety stopped him” (75-76). One the one hand, the return of
the word “vague” serves both to protect the focalizer from charges that he knows too
much about his subject’s inner state. Heppenstall has created a situation which neatly
challenges the narrative conventions of the late James, who also frequently used the
word “vague” to describe characters and their states of mind. James’s narrators, like
the focalizer Frobisher in this scene, narrate the detailed actions and thoughts of
various characters while keeping themselves largely objective. James occasionally
allows his characters moments of insight into each other’s minds. But the complex
narrative situation in Saturnine points up the unreality of such narrators and insights.
Here, the third-person narration is embedded inside a focalized version of a firstperson
narrator: there is no objective heterodiegetic narrator to ground the description
in a sense of reality. Moreover, the situation itself is unreal. Frobisher’s insights are
not into someone else’s mind, but, as the novel will reveal shortly, into his own. But
the insights are ultimately superficial—and Frobisher has throughout the novel shown
himself with little ability to understand his own thoughts and motivations, let alone
those of other people. Whereas James produced insight through objective narration of
mental processes, in Saturnine the workings of mental processes overwhelm objective
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