Modern: T.S. Eliot - The Wasteland

• Gave its name to an era
• Published in 1922
• Fitzgerald sets Great Gatsby in summer of 1922
• When first came out, people didn't understand it. Thought it was a cry of despair, it's not. Proofrock is cry of despair. Ends up with most pessimistic outcome. Not even love can save him. Not that someone won't love him, it's that he can't love himself?
• At beginning, narrator (whom Eliot identifies as .... not Eliot, not first person... actually narrator is fictional character Tyresius from Greek myth - Blind prophe; Tyresius got turned both female and male - man turned into a woman and then back into a man and then asked who has greater pleasure men or women)
• Tyresius is essentially giving reader guided tour through everything he remembers. In other words, he realizes that his life is shattered and he's going to look at every single little last fragment of it in an effort to make some sense out of it.
• And then at the end he says "these fragments I have shored against my ruin." His life is a ruin... I've looked through all these fragments and braced them up. My life may not make lots of sense but at least its mine - I've looked at all of the fragments/pieces and I'm achieving peace.
• Wasteland isn't despair, it's first step on route back. First step back ins for individual to find a way to impose a little bit of order on his or her corner of the world as they see it.
• People first thought it was a cry of despair, but it's not
• bits of pieces of different kinds of literature, lyrics
• Narrator in Tyresius: the blind prophet from Greece
• gives reader guide tour through everything he remembers
• realizes his life is shattered, and tries to examine it to make sense
• At the end, he says his life is a ruin, tries to brace the shards up and keep them together
• He says that at least he can know
• this is the first step on the road back to finding order from shattered world.