"With Inviolable Voice": Eliot's Redeeming Word in The Waste Land

Abstract

This paper analyzes the notions of despair and selfhood in The Waste Land through the prism of Soren Kierkegaard’s Sickness unto Death (1849). It contends that despite the sense of loss and meaninglessness of existence, The Waste Land traces the journey of the self from ignorance and suffering, from being bound to temporality and sensual thirst, through “the dark night of the soul” to a vantage point from where it can see into “the heart of light.” Furthermore, it claims that Eliot is a twentieth century Dante who goes beyond European frontiers and attempts to reconcile Christianity, Buddhism and the Vedanta with an existentialist discourse.