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

evolutionaries find that another group of revolutionaries has already seized the
control tower. By abdicating a leadership role in the drama, Pat abdicates a central
place in the narrative.
Nevertheless, the narrative, increasingly driven by action-oriented genre
conventions, with the stakes externalized to the fate of an entire airport at least,
continues. Pat initially seems to have been wiped entirely from the narrative. No
longer can we see Burleigh and Bunny playing out the operas and detective fictions
running through Pat’s head, pursuing her concerns about the “missing member” in an
otherwise apparently uneventful Transit Lounge. At the beginning of Section Four,
and periodically throughout, a detached third-person voice, no longer connected to
any consciousness, gives a pseudo-scholarly account of the Revolution of Perpetual
War. Other lines of narrative include parodic accounts of God Almighty, the
“mannerist angel” (and the attempts of Baroco, a black member of the lesbian
revolutionaries, to set off an explosion).
Eventually, however, Pat begins to re-emerge as something other than the
abdicated author of the proceedings. Pat appears somewhat obliquely in two pairs of
dialogues: Och, the protagonist in the pornographic novel Pat had been reading,
discusses language and philosophy with a professor emeritus; they are later joined by
O’Rooley, pondering language by the bookstand. Meanwhile, a Father Itis discusses
Ireland and religion with a “son” who turns out to be named Pat. What may remain of
Pat’s consciousness has been spread thin, as possible versions of the novel’s main
character discuss the interests of the Pat of Section One with authority figures.
Meanwhile, the fate of the revolution, often punningly and cryptically communicated
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