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

how these remembrances fit in with his journey through the town and time covering
the football match. But each memory—of a particular time he visited Tony, of a
particular place in town—is in itself discrete, even as the narrator struggles and
stumbles in the act of remembering. In this sense, the form of the novel represents a
complex theory of memory as well as a devotion to mimeticism as the motivating
factor in experimental form. The form, however, is according to Johnson not only
mimetic but metaphorical: “the whole novel reflected the randomness of the material:
it was itself a physical tangible metaphor for randomness and the nature of cancer”
(Johnson, Aren’t You 25). The form of The Unfortunates is not simply about
randomness—it is about the fragility of the inside of the book itself, encased in its
cardboard body. But the novel, too, is concerned about randomness in life, in death,
in disease, as well as the effects of cancer on the body. In this context, the fixity of
the “FIRST” and “LAST” sections acquires another meaning: the fixed beginning and
ending of any life. In its beginning and ending, then, The Unfortunates is utterly
conventional, and it sticks to conventional ideas about narrative: stories and lives can
be easily given a natural beginning and ending, even if these beginnings and endings
are somewhat arbitrary. The challenge to traditional narrative, therefore, is in the
middle.
In some sense, that middle is completely Aristotelian: it is simply that which
is between the beginning and the end. Allying the novel even more with traditional
narrative, the novel’s form as whole resembles a simplified Proppian function. In the
first section, the narrator’s arrival in town and the arousing of memories of his dead
friend forming a disruption from a pre-existing equilibrium, and his departure in the
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