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

Frobisher is reassured both by the sense of encountering a well-defined cultural other
whose very alienness is familiar from racist popular imagery. He is then further
reassured when this pattern is reversed: the Negro is undefined in popular culture,
but familiar, if not as a Negro, from real life. Furthermore, he is familiar not because
his image is replicated by popular culture, but because his voice is itself a replication
of popular culture. Perhaps Frobisher smiles because he delights in his expectations
being defied, in finding a man more human than expected. I suspect, however, that
Frobisher’s double’s delight is the product of a more complex production of an
other, a man different from him in a manner which appeals specifically to his
intellectual pretensions: rather than an exotic Negro, the man is a culturally vulgar
youth. Furthermore, this man’s self, rather than Frobisher’s perception of that self,
has proven vulnerable to cultural incursions. Frobisher may be split in two at this
point, but at least, he can be reassured, the two are both native to himself.
This brief moment of assurance for Frobisher is immediately disrupted by the
encounter which at last firmly reveals the identity of the man he has been following.
In the following passage, which concludes the chapter, the narrator delves further
into the man’s mind, using free indirect discourse, narrative description, and, on one
occasion, direct discourse, to reveal the man’s thoughts. Throughout, Frobisher still
fails to recognize himself even as objective events reveal the man’s identity:
Then something was happening, and the man with mud-caked shoes
and his jacket collar turned up was afraid. Two cars were hesitating
round the corner, one grey and one blue. I heard the occupants of the
two cars consulting with each other, shouting through the noise of
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