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

The ending Frobisher comes to with the Guardian is, however, anything but
uncertain. If, as Miller suggests, modern novels generally attain narrative coherence
through symbolic unity, Frobisher imposes narrative coherence on his own life and on
the novel through an updated version of the Medieval near-death vision and its
philosophical consolation. The force of the encounter is to purge Frobisher of the
uncertainty and “anxiety” he cannot escape even in death (119). This anxiety,
according to the Guardian, is largely attributable to an unhealthy relationship with
time, something we might associate with both a modern mind-set and modernism
itself. Frobisher is chastised for his obsession with the past, for his attempts to forget
his past, and for his attempts to make contact with “Thea,” whom the Guardian
establishes firmly as a woman Frobisher knew in a previous life (121). Furthermore,
Frobisher is challenged for his explicitly Freudian diagnosis of his own condition: “I
have been allowing the death-wish to predominate” (120). To this, the Guardina
replies, “That is a phrase just now current on earth, I believe. It is a misleading
phrase. It implies that death is peace, freedom from responsibility” (120). The
Guardian’s answer implies not that the Freudian analysis is incorrect, but that, by
naming the death-wish, we increase, rather than decrease, the chances that we will fall
prey to the death-wish. That is, Frobisher’s encounter with the Guardian is not
epistemological in nature, but ontological: it is aimed not at Frobisher understanding
the nature of his psyche and its relationship to past, present, and future, but at altering
his mode of being. And it is startlingly effective: no sooner has Frobisher been
chastised for his attachment to “Thea,” than he is filled with happiness and “beg[ins]
to wish that [he] had not died” (121). It is only a small step further for Frobisher to
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