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

eal world, yet the novel explores its subject at a time of psychological instability,
blending a naturalistic world with a highly subjective world of delusion or
spirituality. Chapter 4 examines both Saturnine’s long middle, in which a series of
apparent delusions culminating in a near-death experience pepper an episodic
Picaresque tale, and its short middle, a chapter in which the narrator and protagonist
Frobisher follows a man who turns out to be himself. While both middles help lend
the apparently episodic narrative structure while creating sometimes unresolved
epistemological problems for both the reader and Frobisher, this short middle in
particular dramatizes the split in consciousness at the novel’s halfway point. This split
is complicated by the narrator’s position, exploring fundamental modernist
epistemological questions related to the self, reading, and narration. Both middles add
to these modernist questions nascent postmodernist ontological questions, as the
epistemological problems associated with Frobisher’s narration and consciousness
spill into ontological questions about the status of the real world, as it is blended with
both the fictional world of narration and the possibility of a spiritual realm.
Saturnine’s short middle poses these questions in their most ambiguous and
unresolved form, following almost exactly Freud’s description of the double in “The
Uncanny” and haunting the apparent resolution provided by the death and
resurrection that marks the end of the novel’s long middle.
If Saturnine stretches the limits of modernism by using the consciousness to
access realms beyond the physical world, B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates instead
suggests postmodernism in its own physical form, a series of unbound episodes
presented to the reader to be taken from the cardboard box that contains them and
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