ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates how modern fiction can give voice to nonhuman forces through a new understanding of narrative. Challenging classical narratology's strict distinction between temporal narration and spatial description, it shows how fiction can yield insight into more-than-human realities via narrativized description. In a close reading of “Time Passes,” the middle section of Virginia Woolf's novel To the Lighthouse, the chapter argues that Woolf narrates the nonhuman by evoking the materiality of air through formal strategies—more specifically, through the expressive use of punctuation and anthropomorphic metaphors and similes.
