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

narration. Frobisher has entered a world without objective facts and, therefore,
without the possibility of an objective narrator.
Continuing along shop windows, Frobisher and his double reach a
newsagent’s shop, where again the narrator shows unusual access to the man’s mind.
After looking at several pre-war posters, the present begins to impinge:
BLACK-OUT FOR ALL LONDON. My man again managed the half of a
smile. Another placard apparently startled him for a moment. SOHO
MURDER CASE DISCLOSURES. He looked away and looked at it again. It
can have told him nothing, but a sweat broke out on his top lip. SOHO
KILLING. MAN QUESTIONED. He breathed in quickly and stared across
the street, squinting as it were into the huddled shadows of his own
mind. But he knew already that this was only a pretence. There was no
clue for him in this. (76)
Here, Frobisher not only peeks into the man’s mind, but observes his mind observing
itself. This is a particularly Jamesian moment, but there are, once again, several
important differences. First, narrator, focalizer, and thinker are all one man. Second,
while James’s focalizers generally cultivate impressions and analysis in search of
greater aesthetic, moral, and psychological insight, Frobisher’s double seeks only a
“clue.” The mystery tale that is, in McHale’s theory, modernism’s double is here
revealed as such. We are reminded not only of Frobisher’s own entanglement and
fugitive status, but of the reader’s own unusual predicament of not quite knowing
what happened between Frobisher and St. Hilda, despite being witnesses to the
former’s narration of the scene. This third element—the reader’s position of
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