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

Introduction
Narrative middles are a sort of ever-present, yet rarely interrogated concept in
narrative theory. Aristotle writes in the Poetics that a story should be “a complete
whole in itself, with a beginning, middle, and end” (1459a). Since that time, a great
deal has been written about beginnings and endings, but the middle remains largely
unexplored and undefined. While Edward Said has shown how beginnings shape the
novel and a wide range of intellectual endeavors in Beginnings: Intention and
Method, and Frank Kermode has explored the pull of the ending on Western narrative
in The Sense of an Ending, there has been no comparable study of the middle. J. Hillis
Miller comes closest, devoting several chapters of his Reading Narrative to middles,
but here the middle must share space with the beginning and the end. Miller’s
primary concern is the narrative line, and his analysis of the middle is primarily an
analysis of the role of digression in that line. In this slippage—in which the middle
stands for the whole of the narrative—we find the central problem of the middle.
While it is relatively easy to point to the beginning or to the end of a novel, it is much
more difficult to point to the middle. The common statement that one is “in the
middle of reading” a book is similarly defined by its indefiniteness, and often carries
a note of evaluative or interpretive uncertainty. All books, all narratives, have
middles, but we are uncertain as to what they are or what they mean.
Aristotle’s notion of a causally unified plot in the Poetics is grounded entirely
in beginnings, middles, and ends, prompting the following definition: “Now a whole
is that which has beginning, middle, and end. A beginning is that which is not itself
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