In “The Hollow Men” we see once again a major gap in the individual’s ability to communicate.  In this poem, however, we do see a more tangible boundary between the individual and society. 

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow

In this poem, this shadow is like a curtain dropped down that literally seperates these hollow men from the rest of society.

I also think that the inability to communicate has a certain sense of reality to it. I think that beginning when the modernist movement was going on, people were beginning th lose the ability to affectively communicate with the people around them. I think that this has only become more of a problem as we reach the present day as there are so many things that seclude the individual (tv, internet, video games) I mean, just look at the typical work place. In one office, how many human resource people are needed to sit around and make sure that the employees are able to communicate their thoughts and ideas effectively. I sense almost the presentation of reality through the individuals’ seclusion and inarticulateness.

Eliot addresses the unknown in “The Hollow Men”. It is often when one reaches an extreme in life (near death, “rock bottom”) that a person has a heightened sensitivity to the universal questions, the unanswerable concerns.  What Eliot is ruminating about is the “shadows”, the in-between; otherwise known as the journey. There is the cliché saying referencing the fact that journey is more important than the final desitination. Can one ever really capture, recall, picture, that process? Within these “shadows” in our life lie our fears, our naked emotions, human kind’s essence. In the end noone can really depict these internal, possibly universal human qualities; such as a true definition of love, fear, or the soul. And so our lives seem hollow to the spectator looking at us from the outside perspective and while we may harbor deep rooted, unspoken tenants of life within ourselves, concepts we couldn’t even imagine explaining to ourselves, nevermind a fellow human being, these thoughts, beliefs, and aspects of our internal character die with us. While one may remember a war hero for his valor and in our modern world an expose may appear on the news about his efforts and his connection to his home townor family, his true “self” ends with him on the battlefield. It is not glorius and it is not a spectacle to behold. The “whimper” is indicative of every human’s plight of being misunderstood. Misunderstood by society as well as an idividual’s confusion over his/her own concept of self.

Although the narrator appears to yearn for a sort of peaceful decease where there is,

sunlight on a broken column

and

voices are
In the wind’s singing,

in actuality he dreads death because he is afraid that it will be a “twilight kingdom.” The narrator begins to recognize that if the world he is living in currently is a wasteland, a desert marked by stone imagines, he fears that the afterworld will have further abstinence than the present. He will awaken amid lips praying to “broken stone.” This awakening is in a neglected cemetery besieged with broken tombstones.