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

they are perched between or represent themselves differing genres, points of view,
times, settings, and literary techniques.
Like The Golden Bowl, In Transit has a middle which crucially shifts the
novel’s point of view around clear textual markings. In both cases, the shift is
effected by an event in the narrated world. Unlike The Golden Bowl, however, In
Transit narrates the event directly, without any prolepsis or analepsis to separate
fabula from syuzhet, and the shift in point of view does not line up neatly with the
marked sections of the novel. In Transit’s shift from modernism to postmodernism
occurs both thematically and, most important for the present study, in narrative
technique. It is represented in the world of the story by the protagonist’s passing
through a doorway and out of the Aristotelian unity of place provided by the Transit
Lounge. In the narrative discourse, this shift is represented by a switch from firstperson
to third-person narration. Both these shifts are metaphors for an exit from the
interior world of modernism, the world of a mind’s attempt to know a fixed world, to
the exterior world of postmodernism, where the self can be known only through the
social, physical, and discursive environment, but where that environment is itself as
unstable as modernist perception.
Both of these transitions are strongly connected to the protagonist’s search for
a stable gender identity. The first-person narrator disappears, with a suicide note, one
chapter after acquiring a male gender identity, “hurling myself from top to bottom”
(114). That is, the end of the first-person narrator is figured as a suicide, precipitated
by the determination of gender. The narrator’s flight down the stairs, from the transit
lounge proper to the lavatory, becomes a leap into death. At this point, the first-
277