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

transformation, then, occupies the moment immediately after modernism, just as it is
transforming into postmodernism.
The final sub-sections of Section Four are similarly suggestive that this
middle space is the key to the novel’s inquiries about the nature of identity,
consciousness, language, and reality. Airedale Donaghue, Betty’s husband, is the lone
survivor of the climactic plane crash. Don Donovan (perhaps the Irish footballer,
perhaps an echo of Pat’s earlier statement that Donaghue looked like a Don),
searching the wreckage, discovers the missing member, at last referred to explicitly as
a penis. Don calls out “Quis,” and
The response was half-hearted and came slow and spasmodic from
here and there round the sparse circle of bidders at auction, responding
as they were at half-vocal-power and that only because there really
was nothing else left:
‘Eg – o’
‘Eg – o’
‘Eg . . . ‘ (232-33)
The novel has returned to Sexshuntwo’s central Freudian mystery plot. While we
have not returned to a mostly-ordinary transit lounge, we have returned to material
and a narrative mode that echoes the novel’s middle—where an individual
protagonist’s mental crisis begins to manifest itself in the novel’s narrated world. Pat
has returned, if not as narrator or character, at least as a memory that haunts the
novel. The individual consciousness (and its problems of gender identity) exists here,
explicitly, as an echo in anonymous mouths and as the dismembered symbol of
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