In the present text I’m going to analyze the “Unreal City”, a section of “The Waste Land”. Unreal city includes lines from 60 to 76 and it has a concrete setting: the city, considered unreal, is a district of London and it is represented in a foggy winter morning. The fog is a metaphor of something that cannot be seen clearly.
Eliot describes a scene of a crowd that “flowed over London Bridge”, each man’s eyes “fixed before his feet”; we can say that it reminds to Dante’s description of masses crowding toward the gates of hell and the idea of people fixing their eyes before their feet reminds to the idea of guilt, which is also connected to Dante’s Inferno.
People are described as a crowd, a mass without an identity who walks through the unreal city like robots.
Then, the writer recognizes a man named Stetson and reminds him about the battle of Milarvo, during the Second Punic War.
Time is simultaneous and it is a typical technique of modernist writers, and here T. S. Eliot shows his will to talk to all human genre, writing so a universal poem.
Moving on, the speaker asks Stetson whether the corpse he planted in his garden was grown or not - recalling, once more, the idea of death and fertility. The unreal city can be easily compared with Charles Dickens’ Coketown, a city full of pollution. It is a city where people, described as robots, have lost their personality and individuality. It represented the alienation caused by industrialization.