The Waste Land 387unspecified other (“you”) who may be a real com-
panion (possibly the “one” who appears in the bed-
room scenes), or another part of his own self. The
poem sounds more like a dialogue between Prufrock
and parts of himself, all struggling to communicate:
“It is impossible to say just what I mean!” Prufrock
exclaims (l. 104); “That is not what I meant, at all,”
answers an anonymous voice (l. 110). The opening
line may not be a request at all but a plea for release
from psychic torment—“Let us go” and be at peace,
the voice begs.
Prufrock’s continual questions convey an anxi-
ety about how to be and what to say and do. He is
unable to fix his identity. He sees himself as insignif-
icant as an insect, but also as an omnipotent being,
capable of squeezing the universe into a ball, or able
to come back, like Lazarus, from the dead, a strong
identity he undermines by worrying whether, after
consultation with his companion, it would really
“have been worth it” to act in such ways. Prufrock
agonizes about his outward appearance, how to part
his hair, or how to roll the bottoms of his trousers.
His preoccupation with his clothes and his rehearsal
of the lives of others suggest that he has lost his own
mind. Even so, his clothes threaten to quash any
identity he may find in them, as he visualizes himself
impaled on his necktie pin or his coat held by “the
eternal Footman” of death.
People appear as fragments, not as knowable
entities, in a social world where one is expected to
“prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet” (l.
27)—everyone hides behind a mask. Images of body
parts and clothes prevail. Women are skirts trailing
across the floor or pairs of eyes and arms, accompa-
nied by the social debris of teacups, porcelain, cakes,
ices, toast, and marmalade; we come to know the
pieces that surround people rather than the people
themselves. Impersonal pronouns pervade the poem,
particularly they and them.
Such fragmented, distant identities reflect Pru-
frock’s internal collapse. Like fog, he eventually
disintegrates, drowned by unspecified human voices,
in closing lines that break up and break loose from
the main body of the poem. This collapse of Pru-
frock’s identity can be read as a metaphor for the
breakdown in social cohesion as Eliot may have
experienced it, writing during the First World War,
a theme at the core of his epic work The Waste Land
(1922).
Sarah BarnsleyELIOT, T. S. The Waste Land (1922)
The Waste Land is divided into five sections. In the
first, “Burial of the Dead,” T. S. Eliot (1888–1965)
examines the fragmentation of Western European
culture after World War I. Through the use of the
fortune teller Madame Sosostris, he sets the poem
as a blending of both past references and future
prophecy. In the second section, “A Game of Chess,”
Eliot looks at the social fragmentation of English
society and particularly at the impact the war has
had on women. In the third section, “The Fire Ser-
mon,” Eliot continues his examination and joins the
disparate parts of the poem together in the figure
of Tiresias, the blind Greek prophet who is both
male and female. This use of the ancient prophet
further enforces the blurring between past reference
and future prophecy. In the fourth section, “Death
by Water,” Eliot uses the figure of the drowned
Phoenician sailor to demonstrate the cyclical nature
of the events of early 20th-century history. These
are mainly the social decay accelerated by the war
and the war brought on by the social decay of the
European nations. Finally, in the last section, “What
the Thunder Said,” Eliot attempts to find a solution
within the Grail quest and the Fisher King, but he
is left with only the fragments of the poem, which
must be interpreted differently by each reader, just
as the thunder of the Hindu parable is interpreted
differently by the different factions who hear it. The
poem closes with a truncated blessing or benedic-
tion and ends in the same way in which it began—as
a heap of broken images.
Jeremy BrownalienatiOn in The Waste Land
Alienation can be described as a form of isolation in
which the alienated person feels that all the world
has become strange. T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste
Land demonstrates this feeling admirably and is
one of the best examples of this experience in 20th-
century literature. The poem’s structure (consisting
of five widely differing sections), its use of allusions,