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

determining facts about that world and the plot through the narrator’s limited and
perhaps distorted perceptions. DE REBUS, on the other hand immediately moves us
from knowledge and perception to things themselves. The main character (no longer
narrator) alternates and later splits him/herself between the genders, encountering
often impossible characters and situations that both demonstrate and place the main
character in various well-defined gender roles, often drawn from literary genres. LET
IT ALL COME BREAKDOWN once again refers to things, rather than perceptions,
with unconventional (broken?) grammar—but the concern is not simply “things,” but
the world itself. Appropriately, it is not just the adventures of a single main character
that undergo postmodernist destabilization. The narrative now follows multiple
characters, some or none of whom may be offshoots of the main character, in
alternating narrative tones and genres, as the airport is taken over by revolutionaries.
At this stage, for the first time, therefore, there is something resembling a traditional
plot for a popular narrative: there are large-scale events, and they come to a climax
when a man who has usurped the control tower from the revolutionaries deliberately
causes two planes to crash into each other. The CODETTA continues the
postmodernist trend while grounding itself in a partial technical return to the first two
sections: the main character returns as narrator and offers three endings, including a
gesture to the reader. All of these are typical postmodernist techniques, calling
attention to the ambiguous relationship between the world of the novel and the real
world, as well as the relationship which has been central to In Transit as a whole: the
relationship between writer, narrator, and reader.
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