TS Eliot's The Waste Land features a multitude of fragmented representations of characters, voices, and dialogue, which combine to create the overall feeling of disorientation within the poem. Despite this pervasive lack of stability, the poem continues to succeed as a whole; from a source in the text, a growing sense of unification and constancy develops. Arguably, Tiresias is this source: his position in the poem is not that of "mere spectator," but a disconnect that gives him an almost omniscient authority, rising above other voices with a tone of certainty , and thus providing balance to the other. Dislocated atmosphere. Say no to plagiarism. Get a Custom Essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay On a superficial level, Tiresias, as a character in The Waste Land, could be seen as weakened by his limited appearance in the sequence of poems, the first vision that the reader has of the prophet is in the middle of the “Sermon of Fire”. Yet the fact that Eliot places Tiresias almost exactly halfway is indicative of his value: structurally, Tiresias appears as a transitional and bridging figure, perhaps representative of a turning point in Eliot's thought and, as in a tragedy in five acts, and his brief appearance could thus highlight Tiresias as a central character. More importantly, his appearance sets the stage for the essential resolution of the poem, in “What the Thunder Said.” Its presence can be said to alter the rhythm of the poem, and although this initially catalyzes the breakdown of the speakers' language in "The Fire." Sermon', this ultimately leads to the stripped-down coherence of Eliot's various reflections on the conclusive vocalization, 'Da'. It appears to purge the overall anguished voice of the poem, as indicated by the disintegration of the language of lines 301 and 346, allowing Eliot to reconstruct the text to the height of the instructive final section. Thus Teiresias seems to become the transitional figure who allows Eliot to refigure in his mind the "heap of broken images" of "The Burial of the Dead", even if by "What Thunder Says", he has not succeeded than to “put them down”. ) against his ruin”; it still seems that Teiresias has allowed a progression, in the speaker's determination to seemingly recover these disjointed ideas, images, and emotions that litter the text. Similarly, while an important source of dissolution in The Waste Land seems to be Eliot's presentation of the relationships between man and woman, characterized in "The Fire Sermon" by the clerk's "assault" and the typist's siege , the presence of Tiresias and the first person control of the narrative paradoxically unifies the masculine and feminine elements of the poem. Tiresias, as a mythological figure, has lived in both male and female bodies and therefore feels "throbbing between two lives", the word echoing the life-affirming desire earlier in the poem, "throbbing expectation". This transgender and sexual bond allows him to supervise the "chess game" played between man and woman, having "renounced everything/played on this same couch or bed", and to experience the suffering between man and woman on a universal and encompassing plan. ladder. Tiresias's descriptions of the typist, for example, "bored and tired," "lonely," "automatic," are meticulously balanced against those of the clerk, whose actions are "undesirable" and who expects nothing more than “indifference”. In this way, his observations highlight the dissatisfaction felt on both sides and therefore perhaps encourage the reader to consider this interaction, as well as that of the man and woman in "A Game of Chess,” in a more detached and less gender-focused manner. path. A unifying effect is thus created by Tiresias' voice, as the male and female characters are aligned by his observations and the transcendent, objective vision that he seems to advocate. The sonnet form woven by Eliot in "The Fire Sermon", lines 235 to 248, lifts the story of Teiresias. voice into a knowing satire: the romantic poetic form is inverted and misused to convey something vulgar and insult. The beauty and regularity of form highlight the corruption in their relationship, and the sense of resolution it represents is emphasized, as "And I, Tiresias, have renounced all" falls appropriately on the Volta , and Teiresias mercifully retires from the consummation of the scene. The inability to sustain a rhyming couplet at the end demonstrates the collapse of the sonnet and Teiresias's recognition of its ironic inadequacy to the incident described, made more poignant by the emphatic ellipses. In this way, Tiresias' importance is highlighted by his judgmental position in the poem and, as a result, the characters who seem "below" him lose their distinction and seem to merge into one. Additionally, Tiresias' omniscience as an oracle allows for his significant and connective role in the text. Deep in his sordid tale of the typist and the clerk, Teiresias moves away from merciless description to declare that he "endured all" and "walked among the lowest of the dead." Here, Teiresias suddenly elevates the reader above the intimate vision of their dreary union, instead approaching human suffering on a philosophical scale. Eliot's use of the word "all" could truly be seen as all-encompassing here; as a "prophet", he perceives and understands everything, comparing his testimony of this small private "madness" to the tragic magnitude of his "sitting near Thebes, under the wall", recalling the ignorant lust which also transformed into waste. land. It is suggested that the disillusioned Tiresias knows the secrets of the "wasteland" of the past and future, and can thus find a way out. Perhaps, then, the figure of Tiresias is representative of the internalized power that the poet possesses, to progress from the personal emotional "wasteland" that Eliot is often interpreted as confronting in "The Fire Sermon." Indeed, while his memory of being "among the lowest of the dead" reflects the nihilistic atmosphere of The Waste Land, the insistence of his more-than-perfect verbs "having given up" and "having sat down" underlines that Teiresias has finally moved forward, bridging the gap between past suffering and future resolution, thus unifying the fragments of the text and offering Eliot a promise of resolution in the final two poems. Thus, the importance of Tiresias as a character in the poem is perhaps most clearly conveyed by the recurring image of the "violet hour." " in which it is located. This motif opens the first stanza told by Teiresias in "The Sermon of Fire", an image alluding to twilight, a period of transition between day and night, and therefore symbolic of the figure of Teiresias him - itself. “The Violet Hour” is a liminal space, a bridge between two points in time and Tiresias indeed embodies this period of transformation, his form oscillates between the masculine and the feminine, and his spirit between the past and the future; This highlights Tiresias as a key character in the poem: he is the only character who seems to have access to this space of transition; he does not stagnate in the elementary settings of “The Burial of the Dead” or “Death on the Edge of; water,” nor in the claustrophobic interior spaces of “A Game of Chess.”.