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

y various conservative cultural forces, in In Transit Brophy reverses the terms. It is
not the reader, but the character, who disappears into a series of literary roles.
This is clearly postmodern territory. McHale argues that the overt destruction
or creation of a character is highly disruptive to a narrative’s ontology in two ways:
“on the one hand, the ontological instability and tentativeness of the fictional world is
demonstrated; on the other hand, the ontological superiority of the author is
dramatized” (211). Pat is not quite destroyed in Section Three, but the ontological
problem here is arguably even more severe. Rather than giving the reader a clean
break from the character, Brophy takes the character apart, replacing Pat with stock
fictions who, even more puzzlingly, seem to have been created at least partly from
Pat’s mind. That is, the author-character drama is played out within the character of
Pat, who does not demonstrate her superiority to her fictions, but instead is replaced
by them. What’s more, the stock nature of these fictions reveals Pat’s mind—so much
the subject of the first two sections of the novel—as itself a product of pre-existing
fictions. Brophy is therefore able to simultaneously dramatize the superiority of the
author while also demonstrating the ultimate inferiority of the author to the fictions of
mass culture. This wrinkle in the character-author ontological relationship is further
emphasized by the fact that Pat was the narrator in the first two sections of the novel,
and in particular a narrator with strong autobiographical elements. As a semiauthorial
narrator, often expounding views on subjects such as fiction and opera
similar to Brophy’s own, Pat plays a large part in creating the implied author of the
novel. That is, Pat-as-narrator serves as not only the Ishmael-like connective tissue of
the novel, or guide and digressive commentator, but also as something of a conduit
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