Shadows of War and Modernism

Abstract

The scars left by the World War I remained intact even after the war. Eliot and Woolf read the shadows of depression, emptiness, fake laughter, false peace, violence, desire, memory and oblivion in human life with the delicacy of authors and poets. Eliot quickly diagnoses modern people’s morbid trauma and melancholy through the summons of the dead in speaker’s and observer’s consciousness and shows the efforts in The Waste Land to find a solution to the Christian principle while the shadows that remained behind wars drove humans to madness, death and suicide. Woolf also uses the stream of consciousness to express people’s consciousness and unconsciousness in unspoken language. As a language of silence, it enables narrative coexistence. Woolf sets up an uninvited guest, Septimus, to connect to the party and puts an end to Mrs. Dalloway with Clarissa’s silence/consciousness, declaring in silence that a life embraced by death is the completion of a real party. Woolf choses suicide as the last resort to find a solution to the people by revealing such despair to them. Their attempt shows the dignity and freedom of human nature. Using stream of consciousness, Eliot and Woolf reinterpret the problems of the life and the war of all the human differently in their modernistic solutions.