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

ontological—shifts to consider depression as a fact that explains itself, or, rather, is
explained by the physical signs of its existence: “I would suicide purely by reason of
lacrimae rerum. My posthumous autobiography: De Rerum Tristitia (by Partitia)”
(235). Much as genitalia fully explain gender in the novel’s second half, here tears
fully explain suicide. In an ending that is also a beginning, epistemological and
ontological problems are rapidly juxtaposed in a way that seems largely to sublimate
both to a more traditional plot resolution: the narrator’s impending suicide.
However, before the suicide is completed, the narrator once again reminds the
reader of the difference between story and discourse, emphasizing the narrative
transaction, rather than the narrator’s role as a character in the story. However, where,
in the middle of the novel, diegetic narrator was seemingly replaced by an extradiegetic
narrator and a variety of characters, here, in the middle of the CODETTA,
the narrator takes responsibility for the alteration in narrative discourse, and makes it
explicitly part of a social transaction: “I warned you I wouldn’t play god, disliking as
I rigorously do that old fraud’s authoritarian temperament. [/] So You’ll have to make
the choice” (235). The choice the narrator offers is between third-person narratives of
Patrick or Patricia, side by side again, but there is little real choice: the reader
inevitably reads both, and both involve the protagonist falling to his or her death. 35
35 McHale writes that “the multiplication of endings” of At Swim-Two-Birds, “occurs not in the ‘real’
world of this novel, but in the subjective subworld or domain of the character-narrator” (109).
Explicitly fictionalized, the multiple endings of In Transit are also subjective—but they are
presented as subjective in the domain of the reader. McHale contrasts these subjective multiple
endings with the true multiple endings found in B.S. Johnson’s story, “Broad Thoughts from a
Home,” offered, as in In Transit, as a choice for the reader (McHale 110). The subjective element
in Brophy’s novel suggests a more modernist project, but the focus on the reader suggests
something more postmodernist, reaching across the realm of fiction even as it marks the fiction as
fiction.
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