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

structure (which is its physical form on the pages of the novel) as it is of the physical
structure itself. Furthermore, this attempt to attain the remembered object and the
word that allows that object to be correctly written, links the fractured narrative of
The Unfortunates. Another section begins, “This poky lane by a blackened sandstone
church leads, is on my way up to the Council House, now it comes back to me, now I
remember, the Council House, the local name for the Town Hall, in this city [...]” (1).
Regardless of what order the reader encounters these two sections, when both have
been encountered, they form a causal and chronological narrative of goal and
attainment. The Unfortunates establishes that time does, in fact, pass, even though the
passage of time is disrupted at the level of narration. The reader partially reconstructs,
retrospectively, a linear fabula based on a fragmented object. This is why The
Unfortunates is not simply a noun-like narrative, but a nominalized-verb-like
narrative. The reader can see the temporal profile in the narrative, but does not
experience it directly outside of the beginning and the ending. The fragmented,
disordered set of single sheets and small, pamphlet-like stapled sections, forces the
reader to separate the narrator’s experience of memory and sensation from her own
experience of reading that experience of memory and sensation. The reader is forced
to regard the passage of time on this single day not as a process, but as an object—
even when a chronological reconstruction of that day can be attained.
It may be argued that, on some level, all books reify the narratives they
contain, since books are things. In this sense, Johnson’s project in The Unfortunates is
not much different from Woolf’s in To the Lighthouse: both Tony Tillinghast and
Woolf’s parents are removed from the memory and placed in the novel in order to
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