T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland

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T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland

In T.S. Eliot’s most famous poem The Wasteland, a bleak picture of post-war London civilization is illuminated. The inhabitants of Eliot’s wasteland are living in a morally bankrupt and spiritually lost society. Through fragmented narration, Eliot recalls tales of lost love, misplaced lust, forgone spirituality, fruitless pilgrimages, and the “living dead”- those who shuffle through life without a care. These tales are the personal attempts of each person to fulfill the desires which plague them, though none ever stop to consider that what they want may not be what they need, nor do they consider why it is they feel they must do these things. Through studies in Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic perspective on human drives, the various Christian theories of Mark Jordan and Kirk Bingaman, and Jean-Paul Sartre’s atheist existentialism, a movement that demands that a person take control of their actions, the character’s actions can be understood. It is through these tales of misplaced hope that the motives of the characters, and the reason they feel these needs, are discovered. As each mistakenly tries to find a purpose in this modern wasteland, it is made clear that desires are often confused with needs and that while some searches are often made with the best intentions, the most humanity can hope for is a visceral happiness achieved through brief moments of authenticity.

In Sigmund Freud’s Beyond The Pleasure Principle, he explains that each person makes the choices that they do, simply because they want pleasure. He states that there is no moral or emotional state that drives affairs, only the need for enjoyment and dislike for pain that makes people do what they do. He claims there i...

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...teland, it can be said that while the loss of God may have contributed to humanity’s current desolate, morally-bankrupt society, going back to God will not be the answer. Humanity must learn from the inhabitants of the wasteland and take into account what we truly need. By taking action and accepting responsibility for these choices, we will be able to have a real existence and an authentic identity. Though what we think we need and what we want often overlap, we may be able to escape our wasted lives if we only take action and not allow others to control us. Through studies of Sigmund Freud’s writings, Christian theory, and the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre, the desires, drives, needs, and motives of human beings can be understood and accounted for. If we each take our lives into our own hands, then the fulfillment we all so desperately seek can be found.

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