Deracination

Today, modern society is experience more and more of a disconnect from the real world as we connect more and more to the online world. People send text messages more than they call, and friends across the world can interact in a matter of seconds, if not instantly. As society continues to modernize, we experience the same sort of falling out with the natural order of things that authors near the turn of the century felt as their culture changed. T.S. Eliot, Joseph Conrad, and D.H. Lawrence are only three such authors to put pen to paper to explore this deracination. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and Lawrence’s “The Rocking Horse Winner” explore the idea that modern life and society negatively affects those who succumb to its rhythms.

In the first section of The Waste Land, “The Burial of the Dead,” Eliot offers a criticism of London, a center of modern life, and its people. He describes London as an “Unreal City” which suffers “[u]nder the brown fog of a winter dawn” (7), which suggests that London is dirty, cold, and uninviting. The people, too, are unhappy and discontent, as many sigh frequently and keep their eyes “fixed” on their feet (7). That each person is focused on his own space suggests that each person is isolated, despite being surrounded by a crowd. Eliot also writes of the crowd, “I had not thought death had undone so many…There I saw one I knew, and stopped him” (7); these references to Dante’s journey through hell in the Inferno link the people in the crowd to the dead and London to hell. The imagery and wording that Eliot uses present the reader with the overwhelming sense that London is a place of depressing and dirty isolation.

In “The Fire Sermon,” Eliot describes the debris that is a r...

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...rbanization are common themes throughout literature, including Eliot, Conrad, and Lawrence’s work, perhaps because how universal such effects are. These authors felt directly such changes in the natural order of the world, and modern readers today have firsthand experience of similar patterns. Most likely, deracination will continue as a common theme throughout society and literature, as human nature and therefore the world is never stagnant.

Works Cited

Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness: Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Contexts, Criticism. Ed. Paul B. Armstrong. New York: W.W. Norton, 2006. Print.

Eliot, T. S. The Waste Land: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism. Ed. Michael North. New York: W.W. Norton, 2001. Print.

Lawrence, D.H. "The Rocking-Horse Winner." The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. Ed. R. V. Cassill. New York: Norton, n.d. 299-308. Print.