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

Novelist 33). That is, Pat-the-narrator cannot ever be equivalent to a conscious mind:
Pat’s identity has always been an illusion, one propped up, rather than inhibited, by
uncertainty about gender. Once Pat acquires gender, Pat is able to emerge from the
story-minimal world of modernism, from the world of the representation of thought.
Pat reveals himself as a character, and the illusion of identity disappears, to be
replaced by a series of roles, characters, and stories. Pat has never been the God who
mimics, absorbs, sometimes masters and sometimes drowns in multiple discourses,
because Pat is not the author. From this point, Brophy cuts the reader’s relationship to
a consistent character, to the illusory consciousness, to deal more directly with the
ontological, rather than epistemological, threat and pleasure of stories.
“The Case of the Missing (Re)Member” itself, however, lingers on for five
subsections, including the INTERLOO, following Pat’s gender-confident walk down
the stairs in sub-section 5. That is, while the first-person Pat dominates Sexshuntwo
in terms of words and number of pages, the last of this modernist first-person
narrative takes place in the precise middle in terms of sub-sections. The final four
sub-sections represent the male O’Rooley (most of 6), then the female Patricia (end of
6-10) in the gendered space of the men’s restroom. Confident in his gender, Patrick
O’Rooley
approached the lavatory, unzipped his trousers and reached his hand
inside.
There was nothing there.
That is inexact. Something – flesh briefly veiled by underclothes –
was there, but not in the expected form.
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