T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland
Cooperation is the key to human survival, and over time humans have been known to group together to survive. This strategy has allowed humans to develop massive cities and countries of immense power. Without the natural instinct to cling to one another, humans would not be as advanced as they are today, and may not have even made it out of the caves. Many authors display our natural instinct to cooperate in their works, allowing the characters to become more real to the readers.
T.S Eliot’s The Wasteland displays our natural instinct to cooperate with each other as a key to our survival. As we struggle to survive when our world begins to fall apart, our basic instinct to cooperate with each other kicks in and we cling to each other for comfort. This concept is brought up in Chinua Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart. And again W.B. Yeats’s says in one of his poems, "Things fall apart; the center cannot hold." In either case the concept of clinging to one another and cooperating when things fall apart is displayed as a basic instinct that is the key to our success as humans.
The Wasteland describes how humans cling together as the world falls apart by depicting a world from a much different point of view then we are used to. Instead of seeing the world in a positive view, Eliot depicts the world in despair. As this world falls apart, humans cling together and cooperate to get through the bad times. Lines 139-172 depict a scene in a pub that illustrates how we cling to one another even though we may not be supportive of each other. In this scene, Albert tells his wife how he thinks she is ugly and can’t fulfill what he desires of her. As he goes on, she makes excuses about why she is ugly and can’t...
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In "Bums in the Attic," a chapter from her novel The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros discusses the differences between groups in which the upper class ignores anyone not belonging to the same leisure status. Those belonging to the lower classes however, has had to work to gain success and cannot forget the past in which he struggled. In chasing the American dream, the lower class realizes that the only way to gain true happiness from monetary success, one cannot forget his past and must therefore redefine the traditional attitude of the upper class.
In conclusion, it is the innate nature of mankind to choose survival above all needs which brings out the hidden savage in all of us kept only in check by the artificial restraints placed upon mankind by society. The descent into savagery, man's inherent desire to survive over anything else and the need for civilization and order shows how society unnaturally holds everyone together. The aspiration to endure is an intrinsic response that may lay dormant until the chains of society and civilization are removed; when that day arrives, their dormant instincts will arise and bring about a regression back to that of a savage.
Hamilton, Anette C. "The Truth About Men Living on the Down-Low." Editorial. Keepin' It Real Weekly Autumn 2009: 11-24. Print.
Finally, mutualistic relationships are often shown in literature; specifically in, Tuesdays with Morrie, The Mighty, and Of Mice and Men. In Tuesdays with Morrie, Mitch and Morrie help each other by giving affection and sense of purpose. In The Mighty, Max and Kevin are mutual because they accompany each other, and they are mentally or physically strengthened. In Of Mice and Men, Lennie and George are companions and they protect each other. All these stories have one thing in common, mutualism, and just like the hermit crab and the sea anemone, the goby fish and the shrimp, humans and plants, these characters needed each other to be fulfilled.
“The Hollow Men” by T.S. Eliot is a poem of struggle for meaning amongst the meaningless. T.S. Eliot shows the reader how in this day and age society is becoming less and less active and beginning to become more careless in the way in which we live and behave, as represented throughout the poem. It brings out all of our worlds weaknesses and flaws. Eliot brings out the fact that the human race is disintegrating. We are compared to as hollow men with no emotions, cares, and nothing inside. Hollow men all look different in some way, but inside we are all the same. We shift in whatever direction we are being blown in. In The Hollow Men, by T.S. Eliot examines the absence of spiritual guidance, lack of communication between individuals, and absence of direction of outstanding and pro founding leadership.
... authors conclude that it is through alienation within a small society that ultimately leads to the primary characters’ demise and death. Whether their individual cases are self imposed or externally imposed, the results and the impact are the same, annihilation of the human soul. Their craft make emphatic use of setting to the successful depiction of this theme. Both characters ultimately fall into the abyss of loneliness and despair proving that human existence cut-off and on its own is more destructive than positive . Thus their message seems to suggest that as humans, we need society in order to truly belong and have a connection, purpose and worth in this life, in order to truly live.
... upper class is pure happiness. Anthony and Gloria Patch are very well off and repetitively parade around to party after exuberant party, living ‘the life.’ However, once again one would be mistaken to believe that happiness could be found in alcoholic binges of promiscuity and expensive shopping sprees alone. This is the perfect demonstration of how vivid a picture F. Scott paints of the corruption of the American Dream to materialistic ideals. The populace became enchanted by the promise that more and more things would make their lives easier and therefore happier.
The early poetry of T. S. Eliot, poems such as "The Wasteland" or "The Love Song
In his poem "The Waste Land," T.S. Eliot employs a water motif, which represents both death and rebirth. This ties in with the religious motif, as well as the individual themes of the sections and the theme of the poem as a whole, that modern man is in a wasteland, and must be reborn.
...In "The Waste Land," Eliot delivers an indictment against the self-serving, irresponsibility of modern society, but not without giving us, particularly the youth a message of hope at the end of the Thames River. And in "Ash Wednesday," Eliot finally describes an example of the small, graceful images God gives us as oases in the Waste Land of modern culture. Eliot constantly refers back, in unconsciously, to his childhood responsibilities of the missionary in an unholy world. It is only through close, diligent reading of his poetry that we can come to understand his faithful message of hope.
Writers have taken the idea of human interaction and used it to their advantage. They let the confrontation of characters bring out their personality and use the human experience of company to pull out major life themes and ideas. This is represented in The Streetcar Named Desire, The Metamorphosis and “Everyday Use”. The constant interactions (or lack thereof) of fictional characters can lead real people to think that life always has to be built upon relationships so they can become who they should be. This is not true because it is who we want ourselves to become that guides our interactions with other
It is said that George Eliot’s style of writing deals with much realism. Eliot, herself meant by a “realist” to be “an artist who values the truth of observation above the imaginative fancies of writers of “romance” or fashionable melodramatic fiction.” (Ashton 19) This technique is artfully utilized in her writings in a way which human character and relationships are dissected and analyzed. In the novel The Mill on the Floss, Eliot uses the relationships of the protagonist of the story, Miss Maggie Tulliver, as a medium in which to convey various aspects of human social associations. It seems that as a result of Maggie’s nature and of circumstances presented around her, that she is never able to have a connection with one person that satisfies her multifaceted needs and desires. Maggie is able, to some extent, to explore the various and occasionally conflicting aspects of her person with her relationships between other characters presented in the novel. “From an early age, Maggie needs approval from men...Maggie is not shown in any deep relationship with a female friend.” (Ashton 83) A reader can explore into Maggie Tulliver’s person and her short development as a woman in four primary male associations: her father—Mr. Tulliver, her brother—Tom Tulliver, her friend and mentor—Philip Wakem and her dangerous passion with Steven Guest.
Different speakers in "The Waste Land" mirror the disjointedness of modern experience by presenting different viewpoints that the reader is forced to put together for himself. This is similar to the disassociation in modern life in that life has ceased to be a unified whole: various aspects of 20th-century life -- various academic disciplines, theory and practice, Church and State, and Eliot's "disassociation of sensibilities," or separation of heart and mind -- have become separated from each other, and a person who lives in this time period is forced to shore these fragments against his or her ruins, to borrow Eliot's phrase, to see a picture of an integrated whole.
T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is an elaborate and mysterious montage of lines from other works, fleeting observations, conversations, scenery, and even languages. Though this approach seems to render the poem needlessly oblique, this style allows the poem to achieve multi-layered significance impossible in a more straightforward poetic style. Eliot’s use of fragmentation in The Waste Land operates on three levels: first, to parallel the broken society and relationships the poem portrays; second, to deconstruct the reader’s familiar context, creating an individualized sense of disconnection; and third, to challenge the reader to seek meaning in mere fragments, in this enigmatic poem as well as in a fractious world.
T.S Eliot’s poem, The Waste Land, is written in the mood of society after World War I. By using these allusions, The Waste Land reflects on mythical, historical, and literary events. The poem displays the deep disillusionment felt during this time period. In the after math of the great war, in an industrialized society that lacks the traditional structure of authority and belief, in the soil that may not be conductive to new growth (Lewis). Eliot used various allusions that connected to the time period and the effect of the war on society in his poem. Aided by Eliot’s own notes and comments, scholars have been able to identify allusions to: the Book of Common Prayer, Geoffrey Chaucer, Charles-Louis Philippe, James Thomas, Guillaume Appollinaire, Countess Marie Larsich, Wyndham Lewis, nine books of the Bible, John Donne, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Richard Wagner, Sappho, Catullus, Lord Byron, Joseph Campbell, Aldous Huxley, J.G. Frazer, Jessie L. Weston, W.B. Yeats, Shakespeare, Walter Pater, Charles Baudelair, Dente, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and John Webster—all within the first section of 72 lines, about one allusion every two lines (Lewis). Using various allusions, Eliot was able to connect to the fact that he lived in a modern day waste land as a result of the destruction caused by World War I. Eliot used the allusions to show that death brings new beginnings and change, and love still flourishes.