A New Quest For The Main Thread Into The Waste Land

The Waste Land is considered to be "the Declaration of Modernism". One of the prominent features of modernistic works is inviting the active involvement of the reader. Another feature of modernism, according to Eliot, is the "inherent difficulty" of modern writing. This epochal poem is a vivid illustration for these modernistic ideas. Ever since the publication of The Waste Land in 1922, people have been trying to interpret it in different ways. How to find out a main thread through this poem, which can unite all the seemingly unconnected fragments, has been a popular topic among The Waste Land critics. The two currently mainstream ideas about the main thread: "the Holy Grail legend" and "a process of breakdown and reintegration as it occurs in the individual psyche" each bear merits. However, with the former, we are not able to solve the sharp conflicts between "water shortage" and "water hi abundance"; with the latter, it is not able to govern the whole poem. Under such circumstances, I make another quest into The Waste Land in order to find a main thread, which can solve the problems with the above ideas.I start with proving Eliot's Christian perspective during his composition of The Waste Land. By employing the theory of psychoanalysis, I find the sources of Eliot's Christian perspective: the superego and the collective unconscious. Then, I eliminate all the other possible religious perspectives (such as the Buddhist perspective) one by one with a collection of proofs; I further trace the sufferable compositional experience of Eliot and cite the remarks from Eliot himself and Pound to confirm Eliot's Christian perspective during that period.With the convenient tool of the Christian perspective, I examine The Waste Land and discover a Christian main thread, Sin - Being Abandoned by God - Hell -Redemption. With a number of examples and a detailed supplementary table, I conclude that this thread is capable of governing the whole poem. Then, with the helpof this thread, I make exhaustive analyses of all the "waters" in this poem and solve the sharp conflicts between "water shortage" and "water in abundance". Thus, I infer that with this Christian main thread, we are able to tackle the problems with the two currently mainstream ideas.The publication of The Waste Land marked the beginning of Eliot's personal Christian growth, and re-kindled the fire of Christian belief for modern western people. However, it failed in guiding the people out of the "waste land". Critics have been trying to seek the cause of the failure by exploring the limitations of Eliot's Christian thought. My opinion is binary: admit the limitations of Eliot's Christian thought on the one hand while affirm their progressiveness in that particular chaotic and disintegrated period on the other hand. Research in this field remains meaningful in contemporary world since the "waste land" phenomenon still appears nowadays.