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

narratives in Beckett’s Molloy, contain no actual discourse, but may simply mark a
division of a text into two parts. They may also, as in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse,
consist of a central segment of the narrative text—a short transition between parts one
and two of a two-part text, or the middle part of a three-part text. In one case, B. S.
Johnson’s The Unfortunates, I even explore a narrative middle that takes up most of
the text between beginning and end. This is, however, an extreme case, where,
because of the text’s randomization of the narrative discourse between beginning and
ending, there cannot be a single central middle of the narrative discourse, while the
structure of the text nevertheless highlights the narrative middle as a distinct narrative
space. The goal of this exploration is not to establish single, totalizing theory of the
narrative middle, or even of the modernist narrative middle, but to start from a
working definition of modernist narrative middles that can provide a new way of
looking at modernist texts and highlight particular ways modernists have used the
narrative middle to structure their texts and develop key narrative techniques and
explore epistemological concerns.
Sometimes, as in the above cases, clear divisions in the text create one or
more possible middles. In some cases, such as Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim, chapters
proliferate without any larger-scale division which would clearly mark the middle. In
these cases, and in novels which provide no visually obvious structural divisions to
their readers, it is more difficult to say what “the middle” is. Nevertheless, when we
find a shift in narrative direction or technique, with a chunk of text either standing out
as different from what comes before and after, or when we can identify a difference
between what comes before and after, we have found a middle. The section of text
20