Waste Land Essay: Eliots Use of Different Speakers -- T.S. Eliot Wast

Eliot's Use of Different Speakers in The Waste Land      Ã‚  Different speakers in "The Waste Land" mirror the disjointedness of modern experience by presenting different viewpoints that the reader is forced to put together for himself. This is similar to the disassociation in modern life in that life has ceased to be a unified whole: various aspects of 20th-century life -- various academic disciplines, theory and practice, Church and State, and Eliot's "disassociation of sensibilities," or separation of heart and mind -- have become separated from each other, and a person who lives in this time period is forced to shore these fragments against his or her ruins, to borrow Eliot's phrase, to see a picture of an integrated whole.    Different speakers not only present different viewpoints, but also mirror different aspects of the modern cultural experience. This not only presents a group of varying viewpoints, but also a sort of anthropological description of post-World War II Europe. For instance, Eliot gives a picture of the rootlessness experienced by many Europeans in line...