Foreshadowing In The Hollow Men

Eliot criticises the lack of meaning in life through ‘The Hollow Men’, where he conveys this idea through the literary nomenclature of Guy Fawkes and Mister Kurtz in the epigraph. These two figures each vary in their associations, yet both being generalised as “hollow” and “stuffed men”, and filled with “straws”, clearly conveying the barren state of life similar to a scarecrow. The allusion to “Mistah Kurtz” from the novel ‘Heart of Darkness’ by Joseph Conrad presents the idea of hollowness in one's success; the character Kurtz dies a purposeless death. This shows no matter how successful you are while alive, death awaits in the end and all accomplishments become nothing. Alternatively it could be interpreted that success is meaningless,

It is directly employed to the readers through the epigraph of The Waste Land. The epigraph is a direct quotation from Petronius’ Satyricon, where the character Cumean Sibyl is granted immortality but no perpetual youth. In the paragraph Sibyl has shrunken to the size of a jar that onlookers look at her with ignorance and disgust, she states that she “wants to die”. The sense of diminishment is presented here literally through Sibyl, that regardless of who you are in the past, people will eventually forget your importance and become one with the ordinary. This idea is also present in The Hollow Men where Eliot uses the allusion of Guy Fawkes becoming a symbol of fun for children instead of the initial intentions of his actions. Furthermore, the epigraph sets the poem’s tone with an extreme sense of futility and hopelessness. This idea is presented through the recurring motif of water throughout the poem, where it symbolises life. However, Eliot chooses the idea of barren, dryness to illustrate the idea of lack of life in a war-torn society; “dry stone no sound of water”, “now water but only rock - Rock and no water”, “there were the sound of water only” “but there is no water” and the “dry sterile thunder without rain”. Through these recurring ideas of dryness Eliot effectively conveys the idea of bleakness and death, that the Great War has sucked away the life of the society, there is nothing to keep the society from functioning properly. There are also contradicting ideas in the poem where there is too much water that people drown. Such as the “hyacinth girl”, “Phlebas the Phoenician” and the allusion to Shakespeare’s Tempest in line 125, where a man’s eyes become pearls after drowning in water for a long time. Eliot utilises these literary allusions to show the alternative idea towards people in society. People are so indulged in their own life, which is represented by the pearls; that they are