YuHeng's blog

The Hollow Men 

Spiritual decay 

Effect on people

Men without meaning, lacking meaning that makes them whole 

Reversal of personification

• Human to object
• dehumanization

Enjambment

repeat of “we are the hollow men / stuffed men”

Echo 

• Nursery rhyme, repeat
• sound from a past civilization

Section 4 the eyes evoke the heavenly eyes in section 2 

The human and non human

Object 

Puppets

Hollow but recognition that we are hollow is not hollow in itself 

Connects to eliot’s point of doing evil vs doing nothing 

Staccato rhythm of nursery rhyme 

Degradation of man, back to child, back to object, but not back to nothing for we recognize this 

Dichotomy in the first 3 stanzas of the 5th section

Two extremes. Where are we. we are somewhere in the middle, the shadowland, whatever that is. We are nameless, undefined by particularities. 

 “Between the conception

 And the creation”

“Between the desire

 And the spasm”

Wat is a baby before it is born and after it is conceived

A being that is not yet born 

Lives in the shadow 

Aborted? 

Conditions for shadow

• Light
• Being

What’s wrong with shadows? So what. That literally says that I am the product of two extremes, of two material things, of light and being. Not knowing where or what makes me who i am, namely, a shadow. 

Plato–image, idea of what’s real. What we think of as real are an image.

Heaven is an image, a shadow 

But if we reverse it…

What we idealize is a shadow of the real. 

We rise from the real. 

But the first one says that we spring from a false ideal of the real, of starting from the real but ending in the fake. 

• Mask, eliot, prufrock
• Eliots all about shadows… and later, eastern philosophy 

Through the fake, we achieve the rela 

Rejection of absolutism ?

• No, not as dichotic as that. Not that if I reject absolutism, then I accept the form of a shadow. That acceptance is dichotic itself. So, by rejecting absolutism, I thereby do not agree with the shadow. But I’m only treading in the realm of the shadow, without knowing where  I am exactly because there are no signs or symbols. The road is black. So, that in itself, of being there, is enough of a response but not acceptance. 

Oppositions but not oppositions because of synthesis from the product of antithesis and thesis