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

The narrator here has access to many discourses and mixes them freely. The
narrator’s consciousness is indeed multi-linguistic and multi-discursive and
constantly influenced by Pat’s surroundings. But self and society are not merged. The
narrator plays, actively, with the international space of the lounge and delights in the
disintegration of language as a coherent, stable source of meaning. But the narrator’s
identity and consciousness are not threatened by this linguistic and gender play.
Identity, then, seems to be intimately bound up with the social realm, as our
sense of ourselves as separate persons depends on our sense of other persons.
Identity, as a sense of oneself as a coherent being, then, is in some sense constructed
out of a social sense, a sense of kinship—these are other selves, I have such-and-such
a relationship to these selves. But Sexshuntwo leaves identity in this realm—in transit
between a sort of pure consciousness and a socially constructed role that reifies the
consciousness. Identity exists both completely apart from and intimately bound with
the social role. Pat’s identity depends on her social sense, but it is not determined by
the roles assigned by the social realm. Instead, in this “Case,” the social realm is a
source of information, a source of “facts” that the narrator (and the narrator’s narrated
self) can use to learn more about the stable “I” of identity.
The social status of gender and the physical status of sex are questions which
the narrator’s agile, socially un-anchored consciousness can explore fluidly, safe in
the certainty of the narrating “I” and its active stream of consciousness. As Karen
Lawrence argues, the ungendered first-person pronoun enables a sort of gender
agnosticism for both narrator and reader (Lawrence 40). The stream of consciousness
that pours out from the narrator allows both narrator and reader to infer a unified
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