Comparing Burial Of The Dead And A Game Of Chess

TS Elliot’s The Burial of the Dead and A Game of Chess illustrate modernity’s effects on human consciousness and relationships. Though it had a seemingly freeing effect on the poor, in the form of indiscriminant sex and relaxed morals, modernity propelled the elite consciousness into a state of paralysis and inaction. Through the depiction of a desolate wasteland and fragmented antidotes of failed love, Elliot demonstrates the decaying spiritual condition of Europe following modernity.
The Burial of the Dead is comprised of four vignettes with four different speakers. In a broader sense, the form of the poem itself resonates with a destruction of consciousness, as each section provides another fragment to a whole, which doesn’t entirely exist.
The resigned acceptance present in the original speaker’s narration is replaced with a tone of prophetic urgency and desperation. The speaker pleas to the reader, “what are the roots that clutch, what branches grow…Out of this stony rubbish?” (Elloit, 19-20) however no answer as available as; “You cannot say…for you know only a heap of broken images” (Elliot 21-22). This anti-exchange between the unnamed speaker subtly mirrors the audience’s condition in a broader sense, in that the reader is never given a full picture or explanation of anything, only “a heap of broken images” or fragments. In this way, Elliot forces the reader to experience the breakdown of communication that modernity entailed. At the same time, no answer is accessible because there is no easy answer; nothing grows out of this “stony rubbish.” The “dead tree gives no shelter...and the dry stone no sound of water.” The only semblance of hope, according to the speaker, lies in the “shadow under this red rock” (Elliot 25). Cited biblical allusions to Ezekiel and Ecclesiastes [(“Son of man” and “the cricket no relief” (Elliot 20, 23) indicate the only hope for repair “under this red rock” is a return to Christian values; without which, life carries no