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

anachronically in its narrator’s life. Nevertheless, the book’s physical form
immediately defeats not only the straight narrative line, where relevant events
proceed logically and chronologically from beginning to end, but the narrative line of
the text itself. Even most anachronological texts generally have a fixed narrative line
in the syuzhet. They may wander, as in Sterne, and they may jump, as in Faulkner, but
the ordered stream of words exists on the page. Johnson breaks up the narrative line
into a set of discrete narrative chunks—themselves subject to the vicissitudes of
stream of consciousness narration. Although some of these chunks may be re-ordered
in the reader’s mind (reconstruction most of what Johnson knows of Tony’s life
chronologically, as well as the events of Johnson’s day apart from his disordered
memories of his friend), there is no fully chronologically “correct” order for the
sections. However, The Unfortunates is not an achronic narrative: the events are not
“dateless and ageless” (Genette, Narrative Discourse 84). Instead, they are, following
David Herman’s distinction, temporally indefinite. Neither is the novel temporally
multiple, or “a kind of narration that exploits indefiniteness to pluralize and
delinearize itself, to multiply the ways in which the events being recounted can be
chained together to produce ‘the’ narrative itself” (Herman, Story 219). More
importantly, at the level of narration as well as the level of the physical text, there is
no single correct narrative line in the syuzhet. Indeed, for the book as an object (rather
than a particular reading of the novel), there is no line at all, but a set of discretely
bound component objects, arranged provisionally in a series.
The novel’s rejection of a fixed arrangement of the middle, even as first and
last sections mark clear beginning and ending points for the narrative line, suggest
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