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

at both. This particular failure is given anthropomorphized intent: something about
the combination of brown and green, and the functionless supports, is ironic. The
narrator is not satisfied with noting a disjunction between form and function. He finds
both an explicit and a contrasting, implicit, meaning in the train-station’s architecture,
though he states neither. The perhaps hopeless search for meaning, which becomes
particularly acute as the narrator explores the implications of Tony’s life and death, is
from the beginning strained by a typically modernist predilection for both obscurity
and sophistication. Architecture also provides a contrast with the human body
because of its relative, but still incomplete, longevity. Architecture, unlike Tony’s
body, is still there to be examined, marks this place in a way which Tony himself
cannot. It is thus a site for interrogation of both the connections and disjunctions
between present and past, not least in its role, here and in other places, as a Proustian
trigger for memory.
Johnson’s narrative, however, does not flow into the past. The shift from
architecture to Tony is not explained, but is presented as an unconventional gap in the
page, representing a gap in thought (or perhaps a gap in verbalizable thought). In the
segment beginning, “Up there, yes,” a similar gap marks the narrator’s mind as it
skips from recognizing a building he associates with Tony. The Unfortunates uses
these gaps frequently to represent empty spots in the narrator’s stream of
consciousness, but also to mark shifts in memory. This is particularly important in
sections that mix past and present, like “FIRST” and “Up there, yes.” In the latter,
each gap brings the narrative more deeply into memory. Walking about town, the
narrator recognizes a radar tower, which leads his mind to what Tony had said about
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