Part B - The Hollow Men Part (The Road)

That poem? Wow, enough said. The visions of the end of the world according to Yeats and Eliot and McCarthy are quite similar in my opinion. Well, in the sense that they carry the same aspects at least. The poem is essentially about emptiness and the novel is quite bleak itself. This allows us to kind of "feel" the world that they live in. In the poem, their world is considered a wasteland caused by the conditions of the modern world. The people in it failed to chose between good and evil which makes them incapable of making their own decisions. Hence, they are "hollow men". In the novel, however, the world was post apocalyptic as a result of war and in it contains the "good" people and the "bad".


It is stated that Eliot's modern men was an empty, corrupt breed. This can also explain the people in The Road. I mean come on now, they're cannibals!! How much more "empty" can you get than that? In both of the  literature, the people weren't necessarily seeking to do wrong. They just seemed to lack morals and values. They also seem to display attitudes of "pain, abandonment, and despair". The poem briefly mentioned a quotation, "Life is very long" which mean that a broken man is punished by being kept alive rather than by being killed. This ties into The Road because the man was indecisive about which route would be better for him in that world: Life or death.


Moreover the poem, the imagery suggests that a sacrifice of the 'hollow men' can redeem mankind and that after their destruction we can again flourish. It also ends with the line "Not with a bang, but a whimper". This refers to one leaving a world as they enter another, primarily babies. 


I believe I discovered a great correlation between the two texts though. There's a line in the poem that says "Falls the shadow". There is a mentioning about "Then fell the shadow" and "Then falls the shadow". In the novel (Pg. 96), the two verbs where also used in comparison to and object. It said , "The snow fell nor did it cease to fall". I was able to recognize this, but I haven't yet figured out it's significance yet. Can you say, "mind bobbling"?