Literary Devices In The Hollow Man

The Hollow Man is a poem written in the 1920’s. The poem is a narrative by one of the Hollow men, a being illustrated as the presence between life and death. It is one of the major works Eliot wrote during his middle age, reflecting on the post-World War One era. The poem is divided into five parts, spoken by the narrative in a speech like verse. With the author’s specific use of literary device, the poem emerges into a metaphorical image of the coldness and negligence people encounter between life and death. The five sections are all of varying lengths and follow no set meter or rhyme scheme. As a result, the poem would fall under the category of “free verse” since it does not contain these elements. The poem mainly consists of short lines. It is spoken from the perspective of the Hollow man, “The Hollow Men” seems to be in a wasteland, living between salvation and Damnation. The whole text gave the reader a sense of gloom and despair. It is interesting how the narrator spoke from an objective point of view on his own experience. The statement like tone gave us a sense of lifeless emptiness. From the description of the setting we can conjecture that these people are in the progress

It is where the character, Mistah Kurtz, is declared death. In the novel, Mistah Kurtz is described as a successful merchant, but at some point is described as "hollow to the core and lacking a human and moral nature.” Therefore we can assume that the poem is set after the character’s death, and people like Mistah Kurtz have become “The Hollow Men”. The second quotation, “A penny for the Old Guy”, is originated from “Gunpowder Plot” in 1605, extended to the meaning of giving money to the Greek mythology ferryman to cross over the River Styx in order to proceed to afterlife. It symbolizes how Hollow Man crave for this chance and begs for the “penny”.