New Modes of Characterization in The Waste Land 157Ariel’s. Thus Eliot does in The Waste Landwhat he has not done in “Dans le
Restaurant”: he prepares for the drowning of Phlebas. He retains on the
surface the vacant characters of the earlier poem, but he prepares beneath the
surface archetypal identities that give the characters positive force. We must
read the protagonist’s development in self-understanding through the shift in
the archetypes with which he identifies himself. In identifying himself with
Phlebas, the protagonist fulfills in Part IVhis natural fortune. Part V, “What
the Thunder Said,” moves beyond Madame Sosostris, who could not find the
“Hanged Man.” Part Vexplores the possibility of a supernatural answer
through the unpredictable miracle of revelation.
The drowning of Phlebas must be understood as the equivalent of a
psychological experience—as a rite de passageor psychic dying through which
the protagonist can be reborn into the identity that enables him to continue
his Quest. The protagonist has after Part IVoutgrown pagan archetypes; the
references now are to Christianity and the higher ethical Hinduism of the
Upanishads. The Hyacinth garden turns into the garden of Gethsemane:
“After the torchlight red on sweaty faces/ After the frosty silence in the
gardens.” The missing “Hanged Man” of the Tarot deck turns into the
hooded figure whom the disciples on the journey to Emmaus saw but did not
recognize as the risen Christ:
Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
—But who is that on the other side of you?Eliot so suggestively avoids specification that he eludes an exclusively
Christian reading and turns the personages and situation archetypal. He
makes the passage refer also to an account he read of an Antarctic expedition
where the explorers, as he says in his note to these lines, “at the extremity of
their strength, had the constant delusion that there was one more memberthan
could actually be counted.” Because of the new concept of identity advanced
in The Waste Land,we have had to learn how to read a passage in which the
twentieth-century London protagonist exhibits his character by melting into
other quite remote characters—a disciple of Christ, an Antarctic explorer.
We are to understand by the identifications that the protagonist has reached
the point where he has intimations of Godhead.