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

death vision, in which life is self-determined. Here, however, he admonishes himself
to keep away: “I must bear it in mind if I am one day tempted to assume a right and to
make demands upon this Judy Frobisher. It may be that parents have a duty towards
their child, but a child has none towards them. A child is born free, and this means
free of parenthood” (145). Frobisher suggests that a free, unified soul is possible, but
fragile, that external influence quickly destroys this second idea of the self. The self
would then, presumably, fracture, defaulting to the first model. Frobisher sees his
daughter born whole, but fears damage and fragmentation (he is reluctant to hold her
for fear of dropping her). Events and external influence—the stuff of the middles of
narratives—threaten the wholeness of beginnings and the possibility of wholeness of
endings.
The heightened background of the war nevertheless provides Frobisher
something of an anchor. Narrator and character seem both to assent in a judgment
when he notes, “On Tuesday, April 9th, the war ascended to new heights of unreality”
(135). At this point, the unreality no longer bleeds from Frobisher’s mind into the real
world: the real world is itself unreal, allowing Frobisher to offer his own mind as a
reassuring contrast. Frobisher joins the military on June 15, 1940, the day after the
French government’s flight. Two days later, he remarks,
For me the bottom had dropped out of the war. France was the only
country of which I could ever at any time have conceived myself to be
a citizen. When France collapsed, the world had ended. The outside
world, that is to say. Throughout May, June and July, my inner world
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