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

The narrator identifies this as “Explicit fiction,” then concludes with a declaration of
love to the reader, suggesting that the lines between reader and writer, like those
between modernism and postmodernism, are permeable: “Love of You has, I mean to
say, decided me to live. I conceive I can read as well as be read like a book. I desire
You to locute me. […] both of You” (236). The emphasis here on the implied
reader—important in the first section of the novel—gains new meaning after the
pluralization of protagonists in the novel’s second half. If, as Brophy has argued,
readers of novels allow themselves to be taken over by authors, In Transit suggests
that the narrator of a novel is equally a reader. If, in the middle of the novel, the
narrator seemed to become alternately (or simultaneously) Patrick and Patricia, the
CODETTA suggests that it as much the reader who is transformed into multiple
personae as the narrator. The text is celebrated as a space where identity is permeable,
and ambiguity of meaning is a source of joy rather than anxiety. In a sense, this is a
postmodernist celebration of modernism, epistemological problems of the text re-cast
as ontological solutions to the problem of isolated identity in a polyglot world. The
postmodernist turn on verbal ambiguity is extended on the novel’s final page, which
consists of the word “FIN” placed in a drawing of a fish (237). The visual and verbal
pun further emphasizes the text as discursive transaction. The word “FIN” is both a
speech act that ends both story and discourse and a sign that labels the fish’s fin.
Furthermore, the “fin” it refers to is both the fin in the drawing on the page and the
fin of the imagined fish to which the drawing refers. Simultaneously, the fin in the
drawing refers back to the end of the novel. That is, story and discourse is multilayered
here, as signs refer to further signs, and discourse itself becomes the story.
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