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

Conclusion
Modernism and narrative middles are mutually illuminating subjects.
Modernist texts frequently employ extreme, experimental, or variable narrative
techniques. When they employ or alter these techniques in the middle of a text, they
help the audience to identify a distinct narrative middle: a central section of the text
or division in the text that is a key structuring element of the text as a whole.
Narrative middles may be used to reshape genre the direction of the narrative, as they
are in Lord Jim. They may reconfigure point of view, as does the middle of The
Golden Bowl. They may depart radically from the narrative technique of the rest of a
novel, creating their own space for exploration of narrative tense, mood, and voice, as
we have seen in To the Lighthouse. Narrative middles may also delve deeper into the
consciousness, upsetting some of the assumptions of traditional narrative and unified
character, as we have seen in Saturnine. Narrative middles may also be the site of a
disruption in the one-to-one relationship between fabula and syuzhet, as in The
Unfortunates. Finally, narrative middles may reshape a novel’s poetics entirely, as
when In Transit shifts from modernist beginning to postmodernist ending. In all of
these cases, the middle is characterized by differences in the narrative discourse.
While these differences may cause us to view a text as fragmented—or may even
tempt us to read a single novel as two or three separate narratives—this difference
also binds disparate pieces of modernist novels into a whole. That is, modernist
narrative middles, because they are enclosed in a single text (and, generally, a single
physical object), create new narrative structures, often out of disparate parts. By
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