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

ut is unable to complete the journey—just as the story of Tony’s life, of the
narrator’s relationship to Tony, has already reached its end at the beginning of The
Unfortunates, but memory prevents the story from reaching closure, demands that it
continue aimlessly until the narrator’s day in town is through. Additionally, while the
narrative of The Unfortunates itself has no order and no temporal profile, the act of
reading does: the individual reader circles the narrative, even as the narrator’s mind
circles Tony.
It is more obvious how The Unfortunates instantiates randomness in its form.
However, while within each section, the randomness of memory seems motivated, as
the narrator’s first memory of Tony is motivated by the station, the reader’s
experience of randomness from section to section has no particular motivation.
Randomness, then, is not an unproblematic term: there is the seeming randomness of
thought, associating sensory stimuli and thoughts to other thoughts; and there is the
formalized randomness of the middle of the Unfortunates: a set number of parameters
left to pure chance. This suggests that, while randomness is ostensibly a characteristic
of memory, this is illusory: true randomness is a characteristic not of the memory, but
of the universe: of Tony’s fate, not of the narrator’s recollection of that fate. This,
then, produces a reverse reading of the disordered middle of The Unfortunates: while
it may represent the inability of memory to produce an ordered reconstruction of
events, it may also represent the arbitrary disruption by random events of the
meaning-making, associational “randomness” of memory. There is thus a central
irony to the form of The Unfortunates: it is both a modernist representation of
memory—an experimental formal solution to a problem in realistic mimesis—and a
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