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

as knowing it, as he did not know others in the city, which might be
full of nits and bedbugs, fleas and vermin: just opposite the tech.
Before leaving London we had in the Strand Woolworths
bought a wedding ring […] (“Up there, yes” 1)
The narrative begins to move chronologically through the visit, but it begins in the
pluperfect, marking a shift from the original remembered moment. So do most of the
memories in The Unfortunates move: as straightforwardly as possible, but including
the narrator’s struggles to remember and supply as many relevant details as possible.
Once the memory has been triggered, the narrative problem is not how to render the
preverbal flow of memory, with the temporal shifts and over-closeness to sensory
data commonly associated with modernism. Instead, the problem is how to extract
facts from memory. Of the (unspecified) symbolism of a wedding band he and
Wendy buy so that they can rent a room together, the narrator wonders, “Or yet again,
do I impose this in the knowledge of what happened later? A constant, ha, distorting
process, what is true, about that past, about Wendy, about Tony?” (“Up there, yes” 2).
The narrator returns to the theme that subsequent memories distort memories of the
past—calling the entire project of the novel into question, since Tony’s death may
distort the narrator’s memory not only of the city, but of Tony himself.
“Up there, yes” continues to tell the story of this second visit to the Midlands
town, sometimes remembering with certainty, sometimes reasoning about what
probably or must have happened. It does not, however, return to the frame of the
narrator’s walk around town before covering the soccer match. As a rare segment in
the middle of The Unfortunates that combines both the narrator’s current visit and
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