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

end of the story, though he is reluctant to imbue this authority entirely in himself (“as
the subs will think”). The moment that ends the story is near the end of the match, but
is not itself the end of the match. Even in systems such as sporting events that have
rules to determine their beginnings and ends, narrative, whether determined
collectively (by the conventions of sportswriting, by common assumptions about the
probabilities of various outcomes) or individually (by a particular writer, by the coach
who removes his star players from the game) remains an irregular arbiter of
beginning, middle, and end. The middle of the game is such that any moment, given
the proper match between story and event, may become critical, may become the end.
In the act of writing, middle is not defined by a predetermined beginning and end;
instead, beginning and end are plucked out of an indeterminate middle. That
indeterminate middle that is being molded into a story here (as in The Unfortunates)
is ever-receding memory, which writing and consciousness attempt to bar off within a
beginning and ending.
Ultimately, however, the narrator chooses to write a story that frames a
narrative not of the match itself, but of an experience of the match, much as The
Unfortunates itself is a novel about the experience of remembering a dead friend,
rather than about the friend himself (or even the memories themselves). In the case of
the match, this approach allows the ending of the narrator’s story to extend beyond
the end, for narrative purposes, of the match itself. The section ends with the narrator
calling in his story, and we hear the image’s final place in the story’s first sentence:
“Skill was as uncommon as grass
on the bone hyphen bare bone hyphen
bare pitch
on which City beat United one hyphen nil [...]” (“The pitch
258