Returning to the textual memories: The Waste Land 4

When I read The Waste Land, chapters three and four for the second time, I realized that in my first reading I had ignored a lot of interesting details that this time let me to make allusions relating this poem to other texts and to some memories of my own.

The first allusion that I made was based on the following quote,

“The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers,

Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends” (177)

This line reminded me of many things. The first one was the Bogotá Rover, which is one of the world’s most polluted rivers. This river is like the waste deposit for many people of the city. It has the weirdest objects inside, and it’s so toxic, that people have had to move away from it. For me this body of water has always been the perfect example of the filthiness and careless minds of the people in the world. The Earth is the Waste Land of humanity. We destroy it everyday more, until all its resources will be gone for ever.

As I continued reading, I found another segment of the poem which I thought alluded to Dante’s Inferno,

“White bodies naked on the low damp ground

And bones cast in a little low dry garret,

Rattled by the rat's foot only, year to year”(193)

In my point of view, this line alludes to the Inferno because they are describing bodies of people that are dead rotting in a sort of damp. In the novel by Dante, the sinners of the world also are put after death in slimy rivers of mud, fire and ice, suffering for eternity to pay for their sins. This image was very similar to the various described in the Inferno.

As I kept on reading I found the following,

“Enacted on this same divan or bed;

I who have sat by Thebes below the wall

And walked among the lowest of the dead.” (244)

This reminded me of two texts. The first one was of Mid Summer Night’s Dream, were at the beginning of the story, the two lovers are separated by a wall and they communicated through a small opening. When I read this fragment I didn’t only related to the wall, but to Thebes, because I think that it was the same place were that story took place. The second relationship I found was that of the wall and how after passing through it, that narrator was walking amongst the dead. This was very similar as well to Dante’s Inferno when Dante and Virgil crossed the different walls and gates of hell and walked on top and beside all the dead sinners of the world.

Finally I found this quotation that got to my attention,

“A current under sea

Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell

He passed the stages of his age and youth

Entering the whirlpool”(315)

I found that it alluded to Slaughter House- Five, because it mentioned that when a person was drowning to they saw their life flash before their eyes and they recall the moments of the past. I think that the same occurred to Billy every time he was in a scary situation or in a moment he just wanted to escape from. When this happened he time traveled to his past or to his future, in a way to ignore the current events of his life. Also, Billy began to travel in time during the war, and I think that all this things that he though he saw were hallucinations from a post-trauma of the battle field. Because he was near to death in so many occasions he jus t saw his past and imagined his future as a consolation.