"Hollow Men" Explication.

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                                                                        Gurpreet Singh

                                                                        1st Period English

                                                                        Mr. Little

                                                                        November 12, 2003

“Hollow Men” Explication

“We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men”                                                                                        
Empty and full. Considering the speaker of this fraternity of contradictions is a singular being (it can be a human, or even a rock) representing the many of its kind, it resembles the likes of a scarecrow…or perhaps a mannequin along the lines of those seen on CNN representing a Bush with a monstrously big nose put on flames. A scare crow with straw. Stuffed to the brims. A substance lacking substantiality. The straw is the substance, but each individual straw is hollow, light, one nuance of color…yet together they make a purpose…one of either being a mockery of what the U.N. puts in its record books of the only super power in the beginning of the 21st century or scaring crows away. There is a purpose amongst hollow grounds, a purpose for the straw to be compacted together. And alas, that purpose is accomplished when a “we” is achieved…not an “I.”

“Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!”
        
This reconfirms my suspicions of flitting together to achieve a statute of social approval, of a status that determines the purpose to be one of those flirting with the positive. And all they have to do is lean their heads, even the heads that are full of straw, in a virtually neuron encapsulated skull. Lean over, and take a toast to their drinks…a mere tink of the tumblers…even scotch couldn’t have a more satisfying “alas” signaling a finality of finite relief.  

“Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar”                                                                                                
Hollow voices, minus the dew of moisture. Yet this phrase is a complete antithesis of my hastily drawn theory within the time frame of how long my eye lids can venture off as those determined jackasses to avoid flitting down (yes Mr. Little, my very own testament of 2 o’ clock wanderings into “Hallow Men” turn over some hollow stones themselves, but I’m not complaining, enjoy). Quite literally, as I’m taking this metaphor minus the allusions I strongly suspect this poem to have (perhaps even borrowed???), convening among themselves produces no rate of success, for the meeting bears no vital result. But whom is to claim that it is a vital result which implies a success, is what out scarecrow is trying to vouch after? Elliot brushes out a downcast mood on canvas, seemingly a sketch of shadows as a precursor to more feet sliding across shards of glass. As for the result of a conference, it can also point to the non-existence of success as a means of having called a meeting amid hollow voices, hollow men/women/what-ever-being-the-mind-can-conjure-up in order to whisper so low so that a ruckus won’t be achieved, so a unison of voices will not convey a message. It is as if these voices are heading towards avoiding a direct message, as if the feet are dragged and the wind is blown on purpose to purposely lead to the censorship of what seems as the truth. Self denial…as it were an existential angst against one self…rebelling within another personality to achieve a higher, a socially correct, status for the other. Of course transvestites are the exception (nothing personal against them), at the very least their own “multiples” are that of physical experience, seldom that of inner beliefs (speaking from yet another personal experience with one, [I even now refer to them as “one” and at the same time say I have no bias??] they do have a clear cut block of concrete ahead of them to wander).      

“Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion”                                                                        
At a first glance on the behalf of myself, this extension of dragging oneself as in the previous six lines seemed like contradictions to enlighten the reader with a philosophical measurement of what the Elliot could manage to spit upon paper. Yet a second, third, forth, fifth, (and now sixth) glance shows not only a literary wrench to winch up the reader’s tempo of faith to wasting their eye-movement on scanning the lines, but anti-parallels in the sense that if all we know is that there is form, then if we truly KNOW, then we’d see the parallel of NO SHAPE and so on, as if it were a double-helix of genomes (alas even biology teaches about life in values of emotions…). It took two lines for Elliot to say “things are what they don’t seem.”

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Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us -- if at all -- not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men”                                                                                                
An it took another six lines for Mr. Elliot to say “you have to be a rapist to understand a rapist” (one may substitute “rapist” with what one desires). The Hollow Men is not necessarily about a journey into Inferno, Purgatorio, or Paradisio, but it definitely centers around the evil figures of the ages-- this much is obvious from the allusions to Kurtz, who stands as a living testament to the fact that absolute ...

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