Analyze and consider the extent to which the passage given is “modernist” in its style or whether Forster uses other more conventional realist techniques in this passage. Forster makes use of these techniques to create effects (that is, how these stylistic choices help him to create various tones, displaying different attitudes, which deepen the psychological realism in the passage). Approaching the task this way will ensure that you are analyzing and interpreting rather than simply describing. Analyze the passage and demonstrate how the author uses different narrative styles to create a variety of tones and effects—stream of consciousness and so on.

The passage can be understood as “modernist” if we consider how Forster reveals the different points of view of his characters. This has less to do with the dialog of the passage, which is rendered in a relatively conventional way, and more to do with the way the narrator asserts unsaid attitudes or prejudices. Take, for instance, Ronny’s observation of the Indians waiting for the party to start: Forster does not treat any of the Indians as individuals. Instead, he reduces Ronny’s perception of them to bits of their clothing (“here and there it [the “dusky line“ of waiting Indians] flashed a prince-new or shuffled a shoe”). Ronny does not like them, to be sure, but the real purpose of the narrator is to convey Ronnie’s feelings and to turn the interiority of the scene “inside out”; that is, even as the English seek to assert their superiority over the Indians, the narration subordinates the thoughts and words of the English to the “impartial,” inscrutable Indian landscape. The English clothes are “like a leprosy” for the Indians; the words of the English women “seemed to die as soon as uttered.“ The whole scene is watched by a succession of observers—the kites, then, above the kites, the vultures, then, above the vultures, the sky, and beyond that, “must there not be something that overarches all the skies, more impartial even than they?” This “impartiality” is of course the point of Forster’s narrative. The “modernist” impulse of Forster is to show how his characters, English and Indian alike, resist reduction to impartial objects even as his narrative style reinforces the futility of their resistance.