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

held in suspense about when they will be reunited. The two columns, with Burleigh
(increasingly referred to as O’Rooley or Patrick) on the left and Bunny (increasingly
referred to as Patricia or simply “the heroine”) on the right) alternate in Section
Three—once again preserving at least the idea that these two characters cannot be in
the same place (here, the same place on the page) at once. Split from each other,
Burleigh and Bunny fall into other genres, roles, and personalities. Opera once again
seems to dominate, with the stagecraft keeping the two characters apart marked by
diagrams. The various roles Pat takes on in Section Three are therefore portrayed both
as manifestations of one character and as irreconcilable both to each other and to a
stable reality. These roles are explicitly the roles of fiction, with the characters’ very
actions dictated by the needs of fiction. This includes the very suspense created by the
metafictional idea that these two characters are in fact the single character we have
known through the novel’s first half. We might, therefore, look for a unifying
consciousness not in roles or characters within the drama, but in the genre itself. That
is, if Pat can still be said to exist in this novel, the character is increasingly present
only as an author—but, specifically, an author whose material is an explicit
patchwork of existing genres and tropes. By late in Section Three, therefore, not only
has Brophy eliminated the single fictional character as the storehouse for a single
fictional consciousness, but has crushed the very connection between character and
consciousness.
By removing us from not only a realistic, logically coherent world, but also
from a world in which character and consciousness are bound together, Brophy has
made her most decisive move into postmodernism. It is not simply the case that the
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