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

final section resolves the scenario. In the middle, the narrator not only must confront
his memories, but he also responds to a specific test, as he must arrive at the match,
write a story, and submit it to his editor on time. We can contrast this apparent
conventionality to Hillis Miller’s reading of Johnson’s idol, Lawrence Sterne. Miller
argues that digression is the key method by which middles avoid making a straight
narrative line from beginning to end (Miller, Reading Narrative 68). Unlike Tristram
Shandy, but like many modernist novels, The Unfortunates is relentlessly on task and
on subject: tightly restricted to a particular time and place, it exhausts Johnson’s
memories of Tony as well as his memories of his day in the Midlands town
remembering Tony while focusing as well on key themes of randomness, memory,
meaninglessness, and death. In one sense, every memory and every bit of wandering
about town may be considered a diegetic digression for the narrator, as he diverges
from his simple task of covering a football match. However, these digressions, such
as they are, constitute the primary subject matter of the novel. That is, it has two
clear, parallel tales to tell, and it attempts to exhaust Johnson’s memories of both in a
way that Tristram Shandy can never exhaust the tale of his own life. Both
thematically, and at the level of the fabula, then, The Unfortunates is hardly
digressive—and largely matches traditional accounts of narrative structure, even in its
middle. Digression, such as it is, is thus tightly contained within a narrative that is
structured both by traditional narrative form and modernist thematic structure.
However, at the level of the syuzhet, The Unfortunates creates an even more
radical disruption to the narrative line in its middle than does digression as theorized
by Miller. The Unfortunates, like Miller’s subject, Tristram Shandy, moves about
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