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

ticket-hall, the long office half-rounded at its ends, that ironic clerestory, brown
glazed tiles, green below, the same, the decorative hammerbeams supporting nothing,
above, of course! I know this city! How did I not realize when he said, Go and do
City this week, that it was this city?
Tony” (“FIRST” 1). At this
point, a reader who comes to The Unfortunates without criticism or paratext will have
some difficulty decoding where the narrator is and why he is there. The new edition
provides a completed newspaper article on the soccer match which the narrator has
arrived to cover on the inside back of the box (as well as a summary of the plot on the
outside back of the box), this paratextual element was missing from the first edition.
American readers, meanwhile, are likely to have particular difficulty decoding the
reference to “City” as an English football club. (Americans may also have more
difficulty recognizing the building as a train-station.) The fact that this City does not
correspond to any named city (or any particular real club) compounds the difficulty.
The narrator recognizes the city, but the reader likely does not. In Johnson’s life, the
city was Nottingham (Coe 23). In the bare narrative, however, both city and narrator
are anonymous. Moreover, this opening focuses somewhat oddly on the details of
architecture rather than the nature or significance of the city. Architecture will remain
a major theme in the novel, both in segments that focus on this day in the city and in
segments that focus on the past. It is, then, a link between present and past—both
because it appears in all three types of narrative segments, and because it remains in
the city when Tony himself is gone.
Furthermore, architecture provides a metaphor for the human body. It is
subject to detailed physical description, mixes form and function, failing sometimes
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