Introduction:
THIS IS THE WAY THE WORLD ENDS
THIS IS THE WAY THE WORLD ENDS
THIS IS THE WAY THE WORLD ENDS
NOT WITH A BANG BUT A WHIMPER
T.S.Eliot, The Hollow Men (95-98). The end of The Hollow Men can only be the beginning of a deep and long reflection for thoughtful readers. T.S. Eliot, who always believed that in his end is his beginning, died and left his verse full of hidden messages to be understood, and codes to be deciphered. It is this complexity, which is at the heart of modernism as a literary movement, that makes of Eliot’s poetry very typically modernist. As Ezra Pound once famously stated, Eliot truly did “modernize himself”. Although his poetry was subject to important transformations over the course of his…show more content… This included representations of the speech of the uneducated and inarticulate, the colloquial, slangy, and the popular. The traditional educated voice as the only conveyor of truth lost its authority. Prose writers tried to imitate science and resorted to compression and vividness. The average novel became shorter than it had been in the nineteenth century. Modern fiction tended to be written in the first person or to limit the reader to one character’s point of view on the action. This goes with the modernist sense that truth does not exist objectively but is the product of a personal interaction with reality. Writers often chose the perspective of a naïve, anonymous, or marginal person in order to convey better the reality of confusion rather than the myth of certainty. As for Eliot’s poetry, it brought novelty in its purposeful elimination of transitional passages. He builds up meaning through comparison of images without overt explanation, in addition to the indirect references to other works. I will now try to see how some of the previously mentioned modernist elements are present in The Hollow Men.
2. Modernist Elements in THE HOLLOW MEN:
2.1. Modernist Themes: “If one is able to dig through this thorny nest of overlapping styles and meaning, then the deeper themes of “The Hollow Men” slowly become clear, even if Eliot himself would have preferred readers limit themselves to a study of the works
