The line exemplifies Eliot's own thoughts of society, which he believed was disintegrating, as the man's lack of sanity is a reflection of the world's own descent into chaos. In Rhapsody, Eliot writes “Rust that clings to the form that the strength has left/ Hard and curled and ready to snap” using imagery to build a tense atmosphere. Consequently, he is able to further his idea of a decaying society; the language used and the meter also build tension and also convey a sense of the rapidly disintegrating society. This belief that society is decaying is still present today, events like the Arab Spring are an example of this societal disintegration and continually evoke an emotional response from society as a whole. Susbsequently poems like Rhapsody remain relevant.
Matthew Lymbers; 17463270. 1. Fanon, Diamond. The post-colonisation works of Frantz Fanon can be contrasted and compared with the canon of Gayatri Spivak in her book 'Can The Subaltern Speak' and Jared Diamond's 'The Worst Mistake In The History Of The Human Race'. Frantz Fanon's 'The Wretched Of The Earth' characterises the rashness of the bourgeois after the governing body or governing control of post-colonisers has left the country.
The valley of the ashes represents the moral and social decay that results from unreached pursuit of wealth. George and Myrtle Wilson live on this land, and they represent the difficulties of the poor. The results of unreached goals is what is reflected when one thinks of this horrid place. It is dusty, clogging up car engines, perhaps also representing the numerous regrets of not reaching personal and financial goals. The valley of the ashes connects with Gatsby’s failure in obtaining the American Dream because it is obviously is the root of a lack of success.
Passage Analysis Page 26-27 This passage is primarily concerned with the lost hopes and illusions of the American Dream that dwell within the uninterrupted desolation that is the Valley of Ashes. Referencing the monstrous eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg and the aggressive and possessive nature of Tom Buchanan, Fitzgerald contrasts the grim wasteland and poverty of the Valley of Ashes, to the hedonism of the Eggs, and of New York City. The Valley of Ashes is a desolate wasteland, symbolic of the moral decay hidden behind the beautiful facades of the Eggs, and suggests that under the embellishment of West Egg and the mannered charm of East Egg, lies the same ugliness found in the Valley. “The motor road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land.” The inclusion of the railroad symbolises progress; a pathway out of the dump that is the Valley of Ashes, and the longing for wealth and class by those who wish to “shrink away” from the reality which they cannot and do not want to accept. But these lower class patrons are left to “stare at the dismal scene” of the Valley of Ashes, on “waiting trains” demonstrating not only their failure in trying to grasp the American Dream, but the reality in which they can’t escape.
Dystopias provide for unsettling reflections on ourselves and our world. To what extent is this idea reflected in you chosen text? As the world became exposed to periods of war and political unrest, society’s belief in humanity has been conflicted due to the corruption and deprivation that has arisen. This has resulted in writers to foreshadow a perverted world by further exploring the damaging effects of such upheavals, labelling the world as a Dystopia. Dystopia refers to a fictional society whereby the conditions of living are exceedingly low, in many cases due to oppression, greed and prejudice.
So too in the third stanza of “The Hollow men” are we confronted with a vision of a desiccated, hopeless landscape- “this is the dead land”. This disillusionment and questioning of the modern lifestyle, of Eliot's time, is also alluded to in the first stanza of the preludes, a poem whose entirety deals with the sordidness and decay of city life where “a lonely cab-horse steams and stamps”. Eliot’s 'The Waste Land’, deals with the idea of a lack of renewal, and death in each of his five parts. The distorted images of nature and the cycle of life that is portrayed conveys a lack of renewal both in the physical environment and spiritually
Towards the end of his life, Freud became largely disenchanted with the human species and considered us one of the worst types of animals. Granted, a lot of his feelings were based on the tumultuous time period in which he lived, as he witnessed World War I and died just as another major war, World War II, was getting started. In his 1930 book, Civilizations and its Discontents, he wrote “…men are not gentle creatures, who want to be loved, who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness.” Hundreds of years before Freud, philosopher Thomas Hobbes had a similarly pessimistic view of humanity and famously wrote that the life of man in his natural state is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Essentially, he believed all men were equally capable of killing,
We are left to believe that Fitzgerald was highly discontented with this new lifestyle- being part of the “lost generation” himself – and we get the sense that he thought that the boom wouldn’t last, which he may have accurately predicted as the stock market inevitably crashed in 1929. In fact, he often tries so clearly to highlight the darker side and harsh reality of this era, that the reader is often left considering the possibility that Fitzgerald has much stronger motives for this novel than we initially expect. Was Fitzgerald’s main reason for writing this novel to convey the immorality and corruption in society at that time? The first suggestion we get of this is through the way Fitzgerald conveys the women at that time, and through the features of the female characters. He often makes negative references to the typical “flapper” style that was present in New York at this time, and focused on the growing independence of women.
Towards the end of the novella Scrooges conversion represents the conversion that the Author Dickens wishes society to undertake to forget the utilitarian way. Dickens’s criticism of the Utilitarian society is expressed through his characterisation of Scrooge who embodies all that the author despises. Scrooge is descried as a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! A squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster.
Foreshadowing is used here as Lear's fool predicted the series of unfortunate events that would take place after his rotten decisions. He literally sinks deeper and deeper into insanity. (end of second paragraph) The conflict between Gloucester, Edmund and Edgar (his two sons) mirrors that of Lear and his daughters in terms of the loss and gain of power. The text depicts an unjust attitude imposed towards