Faculty of philology department of english philology viktorija mi

senses restored to him, his barrenness made fertile, and all the rooms of the house 
made full of life – the drawing- room; behind the drawing-room the kitchen; above the 
kitchen the bedrooms; and beyond them the nurseries; they must be furnished; they must 
be filled with life. (44) 

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12 
It is clear from the aforementioned extract that a typical modern character is disillusioned, 
dependant, and needs comfort and protection. As the phrases in bold show, he feels imprisoned in 
his own life and suffers from inability to change his destiny. Furthermore, Nicholls believes that 
many modernist works are marked by the absence of a central, unifying figure, or narrator. 
Consequently, modernist works reject the personal individual association of the subject with 
collapsing narrative and narrator into a collection of disjointed fragments and overlapping voices. 
In order to extend and complement the above-mentioned statements, it seems useful to adhere 
to the theorist Walter Allen, (1954) who provides one more definition of Modernism that 
encompasses philosophical, psychological, and aesthetic aspects. He describes the movement of 
Modernism as modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the linguist claims that this 
term includes both a set of cultural tendencies and a number of associated cultural movements, 
originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes in the society in the late nineteenth and 
early twentieth centuries. Modernism rejected the clear objective certainty of Enlightenment 
thinking, diminished the power of undeniable reason and empiricism. The victory of intuitive 
variable interpretive human philosophy was celebrated in all the spheres of modernist art. Thus, 
Allen gives enough evidence showing that modernist world can definitely be called decentralized 
world that lost its basis and, thus, is chaotic and full of misunderstandings. 
However, by comparison to Allen, Verdonk and Weber’s pessimistic insights, Stevenson 
argues (1998:15) that it would be wrong to say that all modernists or modernist movements denied 
the importance of science and reason. In Stevenson’s opinion, we can view Modernism as a 
penetrating of the viewpoint of the previous age. Similar ideas can be traced in the study of Alex 
Davis and Lee M. Jenkins who simply describe Modernism as “an unfinished project” (2000:4), or 
as an attempt to reformulate the old versus the new by refuting the picture of ominous outer reality 
and carrying a deeper analysis of the inner human possibilities. As a result, the most important 
characteristic of Modernism is the attention to the peculiarities of human self-consciousness. It 
seems clearly that this growing interest in the unknown and unexplored fields of human mind 
resulted in various modernist experiments with form and with innovative literary works that draw 
attention to the processes and materials used to create as much abstraction and versatility as 
possible.