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

myself, wrongly, I should think, who knows, but on these jobs I feel so hungry [...]”
(“Cast parapet” 1). The novel here attempts to capture a present-tense internal debate,
but it does so by creating a narrator who actively narrates—and corrects—his
thoughts. “I persuade myself, wrongly,” is either a self-narrating thought in a mind at
a level of detachment from its own stream-of-consciousness debate, or else the
intervention of a narrator in the process of writing the novel who cannot resist
critiquing and correcting his thoughts even as he attempts to re-create them in written
form. In either case, the stream of consciousness is framed by a writerly critique,
retrospective if only by a split second, even though it remains in the present tense.
As the narrator watches the soccer match between City and United, however,
negotiations between the present-tense stream of consciousness and the retrospective
needs of the writer to get things right and to fit them into a particular form become
explicit. From the beginning of the section, the narrator searches for a word that will
satisfy both the need for accuracy and the need to provide evocative language (both
the mimetic and the expressive): “The pitch worn, the worn patches, like
There might be an image there, I could use an image there, if I can think of
one, at this stage of the season, it might too stand for what these two teams are like,
are doing. If I can think of one” (“The pitch worn” 1).
Here, the narrator’s stream of consciousness—his immediate thoughts on his
environment as he experiences it—are blended completely with his attempts to mold
those thoughts into written language that will serve the purposes of a newspaper
account of the match. It is impossible for the reader to determine whether “The pitch
worn” is the thought in the narrator’s mind as he sees the field, or if it is already
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