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

had talked, Tony” (“That was the first time, that must have been the first time, yes”
4). The Unfortunates, by contrast, is generally unwilling to write as Tony talked: it
leaves Tony as we find him in the first paragraph of “FIRST,” unable to speak. The
novel begins, then, with an arresting image of Tony’s speechlessness, but Tony’s
death, the limits of memory, and the limits of novel-writing itself leave him largely
speechless in the novel as a whole. As Philip Tew argues, “Johnson cannot render
Tony independently of himself” (Critical Reading 42). Tony’s lack of independence
in the novel is an extension of his lack of independence in this first image: he is a
speechless expression of existential anxiety contained within a structure owned by
another.
“FIRST” goes on to set up other major themes and techniques in the novel as
well. As the narrator ponders how he will venture out into the city, he states in plain
terms the novel’s theory of memory: “The mind circles, at random, does not
remember, from one moment to another, other things interpose themselves, the
mind’s” (“FIRST” 1). Circling, randomness, and interposition, then, are some of the
terms with which we can think of both the stream of consciousness within each
section and the overall form of the novel. The novel, and the narrator, circles both
Tony and the unnamed Midlands city. The circle has subject matter as its center, but
the process of circling has no defined middle: the reader continues around the circle,
stopping at one point or another, but unable to tell when the process of circling (or the
circle itself) has reached its mid-point. Circling does not lead from beginning to end
in an ordered progression, but rather, as a process, has a beginning and an end in time.
One does not circle to get somewhere, but when one has arrived at one’s destination,
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