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

This undernarrated phone call may be the second section in the novel for the
reader, and it may be the twenty-sixth. The presence of the “FIRST” section,
however, guarantees that it will not be the first time the reader learns of Tony’s death;
conversely, the “LAST” section guarantees that Tony’s death cannot be the last event
of the novel. By containing Tony’s death somewhere in the middle of the novel,
Johnson guarantees that the reader’s knowledge of Tony’s death will not coincide
with the moment the past-tense version of the narrator learns of his death. The reader
is thus separated from the narrator’s experience of Tony’s death on a broader
narrative level. Furthermore, that death is not allowed the priority of beginning or
ending. This priority is reserved for the narrator as he gets off a train and as a train
pulls away from town, respectively.
The journey to and from memory is thus prioritized—and the middle of The
Unfortunates serves as a formal expression of that memory. The Unfortunates, and by
extension its theory of memory, is not like traditional narrative, with a fixed syuzhet,
however anachronous, corresponding to a fixed fabula. Nor is it like many modernist
narratives, where a fixed fabula is implied, but may be difficult or impossible to
construct with certainty from the syuzhet, which may contain both anachronies and
achronies, as well as other narrative devices that produce epistemological difficulties.
Nor, like much postmodernist literature, does The Unfortunates go further and create
a fabula that is itself unfixed or unstable, creating ontological difficulties. Instead, It
is an odd combination of fixed fabula and radically unfixed syuzhet that nevertheless
poses relatively few difficulties in reconstructing the fabula, but instead foregrounds
epistemological problems related to the meaning of events and their relationship to
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